The mental illness gap between cis and not-cis females
Survey results! n=370,000!
In my kink survey, I asked about mental illnesses. I gave people a list, and asked them to check the ones that applied.
Aaand for survey details, you know the drill - my survey is at 550,000 people. Breakdown of the demographics who took it here, survey design methodology here, no you dont need a random sample jfc here, Raw averages here, raw data for the columns used in this blogpost here (check my work!)
Here, I’m checking the differences between cis females (n=293,826) and non-cis females (transmen, afab enbies, and other) (n=81,583).
Most of the respondents were young women from tiktok (average age of cis respondents was ~22, non-cis ~20yo), which means we’re probably looking at a more very-online type subsection of the population.
All the shaded ranges indicate 95% confidence intervals.
(I know what I’m trying to calculate - a 95% chance that the actual mean falls within the shaded range - but I don’t know if I’m doing it right. The code I used for this:
df_moe = df_stderr * stats.t.ppf((1 + 0.95) / 2, df.groupby('bin')[column_name].count() - 1)
df_lower = df_avg - df_moe
df_upper = df_avg + df_moe).
The following had lower absolute rates, so I’m scaling the y-axis to 15% to better see the difference.
If you wanna look at total averages, unadjusted for anything, spreadsheet is here.
This is the end of the blog post, I don’t want to provide a conclusion, this was just for the raw charts.
Those raw numbers look staggeringly high to me. 60% clinical anxiety? 20-40% clinical PTSD? 30-50% ADHD? Really? I'd expect these sorts of things to top out at more like... 10% maybe.
It's really, really hard to look at these numbers and not conclude that our society is just way too quick to pathologize everyday experiences. By which I mean, to treat them as ontologically separate "illnesses", rather than as sometimes harder parts of everyday life.
I promise to still keep an open mind about all of this, I really do. But hot damn.
I hope this stupid trend of people needing diagnoses for their regular old personality ends soon. By the time this generation ages into middle age, we're all going to be bankrupt from paying for everyone's "diagnoses" and the "medication" to treat their personalities. These numbers are a joke.
Or maybe the pharmaceutical/mental health industries could do us all a favor and come up with a new mental illness/diagnoses for being annoying. If we could attach a fancy term to that, and come up with a pill to solve the problem of annoying people, we might actually be improving the world! As opposed to whatever train wreck these results show.