Mental Health Epidemiology (Nursing)

00:01 So let's think about global mental health. Let's think about prevalence and incidents.

00:07 What is prevalence? Prevalence is the number of cases that happened in the world over a specific time.

00:14 It could also be the number of cases that happened in a State over a specific period of time.

00:22 That prevalence, with mental illness, looks at the number of cases of mental illness in the world during a specified time.

00:33 So let's look at an example.

00:35 Let's say the year of 2017.

00:39 There were about 792 million people with mental illness or just a little over 10% of the global population.

00:48 So that is the prevalence in the globe, 10% of all the people in the globe in 2017 had a mental illness.

01:00 Now in the United States, that rate of mental illness in adults was 42.5 million or 18.2%, so the prevalence of mental illness in the United States is higher than the prevalence of mental illness globally.

01:18 When we're thinking about mental health in children and adolescents, 20% of children have a diagnosable mental illness.

01:29 We're talking about one in five.

01:32 Mental illness in children is more frequently seen in those families that have low income, why might that be? If it is low income, there's less likely that that family has prenatal care.

01:49 There's also environmental factors.

01:52 When we have low income, we may not have the same kind of living arrangement.

01:58 There might be stressors every single month.

02:01 There may be -- the parents may be working very long hours and the children may be turn-key children.

02:08 So when we're thinking about the idea of low income being a risk factor, it is not the fact of low income, it is what having a low income does to the family, and the stressors that come along with low income.

02:27 Also, military families find that, when we're looking at the prevalence of mental illness, it's higher in military families.

02:38 Now, that might be because of the stressor of both parents being deployed to a place where their life might be in jeopardy.

02:46 It also may mean that this family is not staying in one place, the children are not developing roots in one place.

02:55 They don't have friends over a long period of time.

02:58 50% of the adult mental illnesses, excluding of course, those substance uses, they're diagnosed by the age of 14.

03:08 And, then, we think about the role of the school nurse and how critical that school nurse is to identify children who may have the first signs of mental illness.

03:23 Mental illness occurs across all incomes, across all races, and genders, and religions, but there are specific socio-economic problems that can increase stressors, that then produce mental illness.

03:47 When we think about mental illness in adults, 18% of adults, and that is ages 18 to 65, have a diagnosable mental illness.

03:59 And usually, more frequently than not, that mental illness is diagnosed by their primary health care provider, that practitioner that they're going to for a stomachache, a cold -- and in that relationship, that person is able to say, "You know, I haven't been feeling like myself lately.

04:25 I've been really down for the past few months." And that relationship allows us, whether you are the nurse in the doctor's office or a practitioner, it allows us then to say, "How long has this been going on?" Finding that question out and those answers is really important.

04:46 Because the nurse's assessment, we might be the very first person that that person talks to, and therefore we might be the person that starts that individual on their road to recovery, helping them get back to that thriving area.

05:05 Now, let's think about seniors.

05:09 Mental health and physical health, as I said earlier, are very closely tied.

05:16 We need all three, physical, emotional, and mental health.

05:22 So, if we have poor mental health, it can affect our physical health.

05:29 We cannot be sleeping very well, we may not be eating very well, we might not be getting the exercises that we need.

05:37 So we want to think about how our mental health affects physical health, but also how our physical well-being affects our mental health.

05:49 The highest rate of suicide for any group of individuals in the United States is in men over the age of 65, and so if you identify that there is hopelessness, despair, in one of your clients or patients, and that person is in the high risk category, it's important for you to ask the question, "Are you thinking about killing yourself?" Or, "Are you contemplating suicide?" You might be the first person to whom this person can give an honest answer.

06:23 You are a respective professional, and this questions is not one of judgement, it is actually one of interest.

06:33 Psychiatric disorders are prevalent in 18% of seniors and the most frequent diagnoses that we see is anxiety.

06:45 It's very, very common.

06:47 Now, when you think about all the changes that are going on in the lives of a person who is aging, it is understandable how anxiety might be that most common.

06:59 Now, when we're thinking about our role as nurses with our patients, seniors, adults, adolescents, children, pregnant moms.

07:14 It's important to recognize that nurses are protective factors, and especially with seniors.

07:22 We can sit down with seniors and we can get them to talk about their feelings, and we can find out if there are any signs or any symptoms of mental illness being presented by them.

07:36 The earlier we can intervene, the better the person will feel.