Quote:Oregon has been found to have the highest rate of mental illness, according to a report from USA Facts. The rate of mental illness in the state was tracked at just under one-third from 2023 to 2024.

According to the report, "In 2023–2024, Oregon had the country's highest rate of mental illness at 31.6%, 10.1 percentage points greater than the national rate. New Jersey had the lowest rate at 18.1%, 3.4 percentage points less than the nation overall."

The number of people who had mental illness in the US in 2025 was recorded at 54.6 million, making up 20.6 percent of all adults in the country, according to USA Facts. Those who are younger tended to have a higher rate of mental illness than those who are older. The rate of mental illness in the last several years ticked up during the COVID-19 pandemic and then tapered down, but it is still higher than the rate of mental illness just 10 years ago in 2016, which was 18.3 percent.


The ten states, including the District of Columbia, that had the highest rate of mental illness in 2023 to 2024 included: Oregon (31.6 percent), Vermont (29.1 percent), Washington, DC (29 percent), West Virginia (28.1 percent), Washington state (27.9 percent), New Hampshire (27.7 percent), Tennessee (27 percent), Maine (26.7 percent), Utah (26.7 percent), and Arkansas (26.6 percent).

Since 1990, mental health disorders have nearly doubled, impacting 1.2 billion people worldwide, per the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Those who are two or more races had the highest rate of mental illness at 31.6 percent, American Indians/Alaskan Natives had a rate of 22.8 percent, whites had a rate of 21.5 percent, Hispanics had a rate of 20 percent, blacks had a rate of 17.2 percent, Asians had a rate of 16 percent, and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander had a rate of 15.2 percent.

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31%? Is that right? That's crazy, if true.

(10-13-2026 02:36 PM)TripleA Wrote:  31%? Is that right? That's crazy, if true.

Right? I though it would have been much higher.....

Does anybody who posts on this board know many folks who have not suffered mental illness at some point in their lives?

I've battled mental illness at times. A significant percentage of my family members and friends have too.

Humans are susceptible to both physical and mental illness. If you can suffer a broken bone or the flu, you can suffer depression or anxiety.

(10-13-2026 03:28 PM)Eldonabe Wrote:  

(10-13-2026 02:36 PM)TripleA Wrote:  31%? Is that right? That's crazy, if true.

Right? I though it would have been much higher.....

This post effectively reflects how a conservative can playfully take the libtards to task. Original, clever and non-malicious.

Well done, E-Nabe.

Oh gee.

I wonder why.

Nearly one in three adults in Oregon is a mental case. That explains a lot…..
The crazies from Northern California and Southern Washington likely migrated to Portland.

(10-13-2026 04:38 PM)CardinalJim Wrote:  Nearly one in three adults in Oregon is a mental case. That explains a lot…..
The crazies from Northern California and Southern Washington likely migrated to Portland.

Of course they did.

The maps shows pretty much the whole country is nuts…

And I didn’t need the map to tell me that.

(10-13-2026 04:10 PM)bill dazzle Wrote:  Does anybody who posts on this board know many folks who have not suffered mental illness at some point in their lives?

I've battled mental illness at times. A significant percentage of my family members and friends have too.

Humans are susceptible to both physical and mental illness. If you can suffer a broken bone or the flu, you can suffer depression or anxiety.

I think you’ve highlighted the problem with this survey, b.d. (And points to you for, yet again, being willing to address a difficult issue openly.)

Unlike physical injury, which shows up on an m.r.i., or bacterial or viral illness, which can be measured in a Petri dish, mental illness is a self-reporting phenomenon - - except in the most blatant instances of a true psychotic break.

I, and I suspect every member of my immediate and extended family, have gone through times of sadness and anxiety. Any one of us could step up and claim that we have been the victim at some point in our lives of mental illness. But I am not aware of any who would actually concede that. Instead, we would say that we powered through a tough moment.

I’m not suggesting that mental illness isn’t real. I know it is. I am suggesting that this survey is meaningless.

My guess is that if you compared these percentages to the allocation of mental health facilities, the percentages would be the same. It’s not that Oregon has a higher number of real instances of mental illness. It instead is due to Oregon (and other places) having a higher number of “professionals” making their living off of that non-measurable status.

Is this a function of nearly anything being considered a mental illness these days?

(10-14-2026 04:52 AM)AdoptedMonarch Wrote:  

(10-13-2026 04:10 PM)bill dazzle Wrote:  Does anybody who posts on this board know many folks who have not suffered mental illness at some point in their lives?

I've battled mental illness at times. A significant percentage of my family members and friends have too.

Humans are susceptible to both physical and mental illness. If you can suffer a broken bone or the flu, you can suffer depression or anxiety.

I think you’ve highlighted the problem with this survey, b.d. (And points to you for, yet again, being willing to address a difficult issue openly.)

Unlike physical injury, which shows up on an m.r.i., or bacterial or viral illness, which can be measured in a Petri dish, mental illness is a self-reporting phenomenon - - except in the most blatant instances of a true psychotic break.

I, and I suspect every member of my immediate and extended family, have gone through times of sadness and anxiety. Any one of us could step up and claim that we have been the victim at some point in our lives of mental illness. But I am not aware of any who would actually concede that. Instead, we would say that we powered through a tough moment.

I’m not suggesting that mental illness isn’t real. I know it is. I am suggesting that this survey is meaningless.

My guess is that if you compared these percentages to the allocation of mental health facilities, the percentages would be the same. It’s not that Oregon has a higher number of real instances of mental illness. It instead is due to Oregon (and other places) having a higher number of “professionals” making their living off of that non-measurable status.

Well put overall (and particularly the bolded/italicized segment), A-Monarch.

Some rightwingers will use this info to contend conservatives are less susceptible to mental illness than liberals. But I don't buy that argument.

Thanks for the props,

Bill

How can you tell who's nuts and who isn't. Is it outright crazy behavior or moments when you lose your cool? Is protesting No Kings Day a symptom of nuttiness knowing that we don't have any kings but the protestors do see kings? It's hilarious that these people see Trump as a king but didn't see it when Biden was in power.

But, I'm not surprised that Oregon leads the nation in crazy people...they show it all the time. Those are the outright crazy ones who don't hide it.

I see Tennessee ranks No. 7 for mental illness. But I wonder if the 27 percent with mental illness figure is misleading. It's probably more like 17 percent — with the neurotic Bill Dazzle alone accounting for the other 10 percent.

Seriously, governments have been working on drugs that would alter the state of consciousness for so long you wonder if a particular location has ever been used to test the effects.

What would be interesting would be to take a test set of those from Oregon and New Jersey and pay them to take on each other's environment and then retest them to see if environment was a factor.

When the numbers for something which should be fairly standard to the population are skewed, we should all be curious enough to want to know why.

Dean Wormer's words ring true on too many occasions. This is another. I'll amend the words, "Fat, stupid and obtuse is no way to go through life." There are so many things that the minds of good people should question, this is one of them. We put blind faith in way, way too much of what seemingly official sources tell us. If mental illness is significantly higher in Oregon, then those in Oregon should absolutely want to know why, and it would behoove the rest of us to want to why as well. It isn't natural.

There is either something extraneous causing the higher % or it is because mental illness is somehow being subsidized in Oregon.