When it comes to maintaining the mental health and wellness of American citizens, the 2016 presidential election cycle has been less than ideal. In a recent article in Politico, therapists and their clients described how the last several months of political turmoil have thrown them for a loop. One psychologist even commissioned a poll of 1,000 voter-age respondents to probe the emotional impact of the election. The results: Nearly 30 percent of respondents reported emotional distress due to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, while over 40 percent reported emotional distress due to Donald Trump’s campaign.
Perhaps most tellingly, a whopping 90 percent of those who reported emotional distress felt that the toll of this election was worse than any other election in the past, offering perspective into the general American psyche right about now. But most public health issues—including mental wellbeing—impact different people differently. Women are more likely to seek care for mental health issues than men, for example, while younger individuals are less likely to seek care than older men and women. Similarly, we might expect the mental health and wellness of certain groups of Americans to be more susceptible to the impact of the 2016 presidential election cycle. The effects could vary across state and party lines.
Maimuna Majumder is an Engineering Systems PhD candidate at MIT and computational epidemiology research fellow at HealthMap. Her research interests involve probabilistic modeling, Bayesian statistics, and “systems epidemiology” in the context of emerging infectious diseases.
So we tried to test this hypothesis. By looking at Google search traffic across the United States, we attempted to determine if anxiety- and depression-related terms correlated with searches for election-related terms—and if so, in which states and in what direction?
Over the last several years, Google search traffic has been validated as an effective proxy for a variety of public health issues, including not only infectious diseases like Zika, dengue, and influenza, but mental health as well. When data on the incidence or prevalence of health conditions isn’t readily available—or is expected to be under-reported due to lack of care seeking—Google search traffic can help public health practitioners estimate trends.
While searches for anxiety- and depression-related terms are likely a reasonable indicator for mental wellbeing, correlation against election-related searches doesn’t mean that the election caused changes in mental health. This kind of analysis merely allows us to explore the possibility that trends in mental health—as associated with the 2016 presidential election cycle (but not necessarily because of it)—may vary from one state to the next and, more generally, between red, blue, and swing categories. Insights like these may shed light on which groups, if any, should be surveyed to look for causal relationships. And if those relationships exist, steps can be taken to address election-induced emotional distress in the future.
To assess trends in Google search traffic over time, we collected state-level data on eight election-related terms and two mental-health-related terms (“anxiety + anxious” and “depressed + depression”) from November 2015 to present in weekly increments. We then developed two multivariate models for each state to deduce which election-related terms correlated against anxiety and depression.