A new study published in PLOS One looked at benchmarking the issue importance of mental health for American voters.
“It’s about how important mental health policy is to American voters,” study author Jake Haselswerdt told us. « Politicians don’t talk about this issue much, so I was interested to find out how it stacks up against issues like border security or abortion that get a lot more attention.”
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately more than one in five adults in the United States lives with a mental illness. Women have a higher prevalence of mental health issues and young adults aged 18-25 have a higher prevalence of mental health illness than adults over 25 years of age.
Haselswerdt expected that voters would be supportive of a policy that improves access to mental health care, but that it wouldn’t be as important to their vote choice as issues that get more attention from politicians and the media.
“America has a serious mental health problem, and government isn’t doing enough to address it,” Haselswerdt told us. “I am interested in finding out why.”
Haselswerdt ran an experiment on a survey of American voters that asked them to choose between candidates presented in pairs. Candidates either agreed or disagreed with the voter’s position on certain policy issues, including mental health policy.
« The candidates that voters choose tell us something about which issues are more important to them,” Haselswerdt told us. “For example, would you vote for a candidate who agrees with you on climate change, but not mental health, over a candidate who holds the opposite positions? That’s the intuition behind the experiment.”
The results demonstrated that mental health is important to voters and at least as important as many issues that get a lot more media attention.
“My hope is that the results mean there is potential for political action on mental health,” Haselswerdt told us. “Political leaders will be more likely to support policies that improve access to mental health care if they believe voters will reward them. The next time you are trying to decide between candidates in an election, find out if they have taken any positions on mental health.”