Elegant Squirtle

INFO 2950 Project

Does one’s level of education affect their knowledge of and ability to access resources for mental health? Data about mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic may not only help answer this question, but may also help policymakers and health professionals recognize disparities and provide equitable access to these resources. In this project, we used data from Data.gov about mental health from August 2020 to May 2022. We mainly used percentage of people who received therapy / counseling and the percentage of people who needed therapy / counseling but did not receive it. We created line graphs that showed the change in this percentage in each of the four different education groups during the time of data collection. We found that groups with higher education levels tended to have higher proportions of people who received counseling when they needed it. Those with higher education levels seem to have better access to mental health resources. Additionally, those with some college / an Associate’s degree had the highest proportion of people who needed counseling / therapy but did not receive it. We infer that people with some high level education tend to better understand the importance of mental healthcare, yet do not fully have access to it. We also conducted t-tests to see if there were significant changes in any of these percentages over time, keeping education level constant. From this, we found that the only significant changes were in the percentage of people who received counseling / therapies over time in the higher education groups (some college / an Associate’s degree and a Bachelor’s degree or higher). This implies that those with a higher level of education continually had more access to mental health resources during COVID than those with a lower level of education.