Part
01
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Part
01
People Seeking Counseling-1970-1990
The number of people in the US that sought counseling/mental health services between 1970 and 1990 could not be found from, neither could it be estimated. The useful insights gathered during the research are below.
USEFUL INSIGHTS
- Depression is a common form of mental illness in the US, with about 7.4% of adults suffering from the condition in 2016.
- As of 2016, 31% of adults under residential healthcare had depression.
- From 1970 to 2004, the number of 24-hour residential mental treatment beds decreased by 77.4%, when adjusted for the growth in the US population.
- The number of older US adults that had mental and behavioral health problems in 1970 was about 4 million.
- Between 1970 and 1979, the number of state and county hospital beds decreased by 62%.
- NIMH, with data from 1972, noted that 48.6% of inpatient admissions to state and county mental hospitals were voluntary admissions.
- From 1970 to 1990, the number of residents in private psychiatric inpatient beds increased by 194% (from 10,963 patients in 1970 to 32,268 patients in 1990).
- In 1970, there were a total of 524,878 inpatient psychiatric beds in the US. This figure decreased to 272,253 by 1990.
- In 1986, less than 2% of adolescents in the US received any type of mental health service.
RESEARCH STRATEGY
Your research team commenced by searching through industry data providers’ sites and health media organizations such as Statista, NRI and BusinessInsider. This approach could only provide the number of adults in the US that suffer from depression in the year 2016. This approach was however unsuccessful in yielding the number of people that sought counseling services/mental health services between 1970 and 1990.
Next, we searched through authoritative government and regulating agencies such as the American Psychological Association (APA), the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors (NASMHPD), the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and the American Counseling Association (ACA). We searched through these sources for records or public healthcare data that could reveal the required data or insights from which we could estimate the number of people that sought counseling/mental health services between 1970 and 1990. Unfortunately, this approach only showed that there were about 4 million US adults who had mental and behavioral health problems in 1970, and the number of residents in private psychiatric inpatient beds increased by 194% from 1970 to 1990.
We then went further to search for public healthcare and patients’ surveys from various organizations such as the Center for Disease Control (CDC), and other public healthcare regulatory boards for records or survey data that we could scale up to account for the entire US population. However, this approach produced no useful result.
Furthermore, we delved deeper to search through authoritative and reputable academic journals and publications, as well as psychological and mental research projects. We had hoped that we would find some proprietary research with findings that we could leverage as proxies to estimate the number of people who sought for counseling/mental health services in the US from 1970 to 1990. The sources we searched include publications from the Ohio State University (OSU) & Miami University, journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. We were only able to find from these sources that there were a total of 524,878 inpatient psychiatric beds in the US in 1970 and by 1990, the number had decreased to 272,253, and less than 2% of adolescents in the US received mental health services in 1986.
Unsatisfied with the seeming unavailability of enough information, we went further to expand the research scope to include sources older than 2 years, even those published as far back as 1979. We resorted to this see if we would find any historical data, news publications or media releases that could lead us to any useful mention of state of mental healthcare and counseling services in the US in the period from 1970 through 1990, that could yield sufficient information to provide an estimate of the number of people that sought counseling/mental health services in the US from 1970 to 1990. The prevailing unavailability of the required information can be attributed to the age of the required data and the insights required to estimate it, as there was less developed and less widespread use of data and information storage systems from 1970 to 1990 as there are now.