ZIP Code DestinyAdult life11 of 19

Scene 11 of 19, Young adults report more distress than a decade ago, and the top income bracket the least at every age. Step 1 of 2, Ten survey years.

Adults answering the BRFSS, weighted

Young adults report more distress than a decade ago, and the top income bracket the least at every age

Frequent mental distress among adults 18 to 24 rose from 12.3% in 2014 to 25.3% in 2022, while the rate for adults 50 to 64 moved from 12.5% to 13.8%

Adults with frequent mental distress (%)

Scenes

Where the comparison starts

  1. Life expectancy falls with each step toward more deprived neighborhoods
  2. Inside each New York borough, neighborhoods differ widely in life expectancy
  3. Home values set most of the deprivation ranking

Growing up

  1. Babies in more deprived counties are more often born small or early
  2. Test scores rise with county income, and gaps between groups remain inside districts
  3. Black and white children raised in the same neighborhood reach different adult incomes
  4. Former students of for-profit colleges earn the least a decade after entry

Adult life

  1. Where local jobs are scarce, residents hold better-paid jobs than the county offers
  2. Whether rent burden rises with deprivation depends on the comparison
  3. More deprived places have less traffic pollution nationally, but more within their own county
  4. Young adults report more distress than a decade ago, and the top income bracket the least at every age
  5. Smoking falls as income rises, while binge drinking climbs
  6. People rate their lives lowest in midlife, while stress declines with age

Reading the patterns

  1. The most deprived places usually stand farther from the national value than the least deprived
  2. Neighborhoods a few kilometers apart can differ by years of life expectancy
  3. Most differences in life expectancy lie inside counties, not between them
  4. Neighborhood types line up on outcomes but blur into one another
  5. Mobility beyond what census measures predict clusters by region
  6. These comparisons describe places, not what moving would do

Read the bookExplore the figuresMethods

Young adults report more distress than a decade ago, and the top income bracket the least at every age

Scene 11 of 19, step 1 of 2: Ten survey years. Adults answering the BRFSS, weighted.

What to say

These are repeated cross-sections, not a panel of the same adults. The second chart pools three recent years and is a different selection of the data from the time series.

About the chart

Frequent mental distress among adults 18 to 24 rose from 12.3% in 2014 to 25.3% in 2022, while the rate for adults 50 to 64 moved from 12.5% to 13.8%

The four younger groups start together in 2014 and fan out, with the youngest groups rising most, the youngest peaking in 2022 and falling in 2024, and the two oldest groups staying lowest. Each line plots the weighted share of respondents who reported 14 or more days of poor mental health; bands are 95% intervals and are drawn for the youngest group and for adults 50 to 64 only.

  • Respondents are adults in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Each survey year is a new sample, not the same people followed over time, and every interval is design-based (final weight, stratum and primary sampling unit).
  • Some states are missing in some years: New Jersey in 2019, Florida in 2021, Kentucky and Pennsylvania in 2023 and Tennessee in 2024. Restricting every estimate to the 46 jurisdictions present in every year moves no age-by-year estimate by more than 0.5 points.
  • Interviews in 2020 took place during the first year of the pandemic.

Source

CDC BRFSS, 2014-2024, adults in the 50 states and DC; weighted (BRFSS final weight), design-based intervals

Open in Chapter 4.5, Mental distress in young adultsThe chapter’s report, with every estimate and table

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