Poor Mental Health Days and Serious Mental Illness
Poor Mental Health and Serious Mental Illness Profile
Download an in-depth health indicator profile with additional analysis and findings on poor mental health and serious mental illness in Santa Barbara County.
Full Analysis
Poor mental health days measures the number of self-reported “not good” mental health days in the past 30 days. The measure is designed to assess health related quality of life and is used by the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s County Health Rankings to describe the burden of disease in a population.
Serious Mental Illness (SMI) is a measure of psychological distress and assesses a person’s emotional state. The Kessler 6 scale is a series of six questions that ask about mental health symptoms and is used to screen for serious mental illness in the general population.
Measure: Poor Mental Health Days
The prevalence of poor mental health quality of life is measured by asking respondents about the number of days in the past 30 days that their mental health was not good. Those that report 15 or more days were classified as having poor mental health quality of life.
Findings from the 2019 Santa Barbara County CHNA
Santa Barbara County saw a 3% increase since 2016 in those reporting 15 or more poor mental health days in the past 30 days, though the difference was not statistically significant. Most impacted demographic subgroups include those with yearly household incomes less than $35,000, those with some college, and those age 18 to 44 (see figure below).
Additional poor mental health and serious mental illness findings from the 2019 Santa Barbara County CHNA can be found in the Poor Mental Health and Serious Mental Illness Health Indicator Profile. Follow this link to learn more about the methods for health indicator profile analysis.
Figure 1. 2019 Percentage of Adults Reporting 15+ Poor Mental Health Days in the Past 30 Days by Demographic Group
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Measure: Serious Mental Illness
The prevalence of Serious Mental Illness (SMI) was estimated using the Kessler 6 (K6) scale. The K6 scale consists of six items asking about the frequency of emotional states experienced in the past 30 days including feeling nervous, hopeless, restless/fidgety, so depressed nothing could cheer you up, everything was an effort, and worthless.
Findings from the 2019 Santa Barbara County CHNA
In Santa Barbara County, the percentage of those with SMI is nearly double the national estimate (7.8% vs. 3.9%). Most impacted demographic subgroups include those with yearly household incomes less than $35,000, those with some college or high school education, those age 18 to 44, non-Hispanic Whites, and females (see figure below).
Figure 4. 2019 Percentage of Adults Reporting Serious Mental Illness by Demographic Group
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Findings from the 2019 Santa Barbara County Listening Tour
Cottage Health and its partners heard from a wide array of leaders and community members through a Listening Tour focused on behavioral health. A full Listening Tour report related to poor mental health days and serious mental illness can be found in the Poor Mental Health Days and Serious Mental Illness Health Indicator Profile.
Serious Mental Illness encapsulates mental, behavioral, or emotional disorders that result in serious functional impairment, substantially interfering with one’s activities of daily living. During the Listening Tour, participants identified key populations that must be considered when addressing Serious Mental Illness. These include young adults, who are at the age of onset for many serious mental illnesses; people experiencing homelessness, who encounter an overwhelming number of barriers to treatment; and older adults managing chronic conditions, whose complexity of care proves challenging.
Quote from a Physician
“If you have a co-existing illness, that will absolutely sink you. If you have diabetes, if you have inflammatory bowel disease, any of those things. Every single patient we see in the specialty clinics has got to deal with some kind of depressive episode.”
Participants in the Listening Tour suggested potential solutions to providing adequate, effective, accessible, and culturally-appropriate behavioral healthcare. Requested resources revolve around building capacity in the medical system. Specifically, participants describe the need for more providers, more outpatient services, and more in-patient beds.
An opportunity to improve behavioral health in Santa Barbara County includes formulating a better-coordinated system of care. Key takeaways from the Listening Tour about improving access to behavioral health services include:
- More providers are needed. There is a dearth of behavioral health providers including psychiatrists and therapists. Participants of the Listening Tour say that providers must be recruited to practice in Santa Barbara County.
- Out-patient services that accept walk-ins and have extended hours are needed. Out-patient services are seen as a necessary step to take the burden off of Emergency Departments.
- More in-patient beds are desperately needed. Because there are not enough in-patient beds in Santa Barbara County, out-of-county referrals are high. When people are referred out of the county, care-seekers and their families have difficulties arranging transportation. In particular, youth beds are needed.
