Data issued in April 2013 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicate that suicide rates in the United States have been on the rise over the past decade among middle-aged adults.
Prisoners suffering from mental illness or showing its symptoms are common among criminal justice populations. The potential relationship between crime and mental illness could have important policy implications, particularly if increased more widespread mental health treatment could prove to have wide effects on rates of criminality.
In 2002 the Institute of Medicine estimated that 4.3% of men with a child under 18 years old had suffered a paternity-related depressive disorder, while other studies have placed the probability of such depression within the first year of a child’s life as high as 10.4%.
While depression is often linked with physiological factors, the larger human environment appears to contribute to and worsen existing depression. The degree to which this is true, however, and how much impact public health and safety efforts might help mitigate depression in the populace, is less certain.
Sexual minority youths — those who self-identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or unsure of their sexuality — remain underrepresented in the academic data on youth issues. Such information is crucial for schools and education systems, in particular, as they look to design and improve outreach and intervention programs to address the health needs of this population.
Levels of life satisfaction impact an individual’s physical and mental health, with unhappy individuals tending to be less energetic, creative, and depressed, and more likely to call into work sick and to require counseling. For decades, social science research suggested that parents in the United States were unhappier than their child-free peers. This “parental happiness gap” manifested itself in parents of all ages, experience levels, marital status and incomes.
