Mental Health disorder in Tech Workplace Survey (2014)

By Nirav Painter and Smit Shah

Problem Statement

Mental illnesses are conditions that affect a person’s thinking, feeling, mood or behavior, such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia. Mental health includes our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel, and act. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make healthy choices.Mental illnesses are among the most common health conditions in the United States.

• More than 50% will be diagnosed with a mental illness or disorder at some point in their lifetime.
• 1 in 5 Americans will experience a mental illness in a given year.
• 1 in 5 children, either currently or at some point during their life, have had a seriously debilitating mental illness
• 1 in 25 Americans lives with a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or major depression.

Mental health is such an important topic and we have decided to analyze mental health disorder surveys which were conducted in 2014 at technical workspaces. Using raw data from a survey taken in 2014, we were interested to determine people’s behavior towards these problems and how comfortable they are talking about it and how we better understand the prevalence of mental health issues in the workplace.

Data collection & Selection

We chose data from a data world site which had a total 1260 surveys with 28 attributes.

The data has attributes about employers’ benefit offerings related to mental illness, employee’s willingness to talk about it and company culture.

After ingesting the data we have applied following clean operations in Excel before loading it to Tableau

• Remove rows with very little categorical data (ex. We removed data related transgender due to low data volume)
• Clean up formatting to certain columns
• Remove Outliers (ex. Age column had negative numbers)

After the cleaning process our dataset was left with 1240 Surveys.

Key Attributes

There are a number of options we had with our dataset to analyze data but we choose the following main attributes.

Key Stats

Tableau Link: https://public.tableau.com/views/Midterm-NiravPainter-SmitShah/Story1?:language=en&:display_count=y&:origin=viz_share_link

Dashboard 1

• In survey, males are more in number in the tech industry than females.
• As Company’s size get bigger they talk more about mental health in wellness programs and provide more health benefits.
• As age increased, survey participants’ participation in wellness programs also increased.

Dashboard 2

• We can see a pure correlation between care options and seek help.
• For women it’s easier to get leave than Man in general if the employer is providing care options.

Dashboard 3

• People who don’t think discussing mental health issues will have a negative consequence are most likely to discuss mental health to their co-workers and supervisors.
• We can see complete correlation between people thinking they’ll have negative consequences and talking to their co-workers/supervisors.
• While being interviewed, the majority of the people aren’t willing to talk about their mental health because they might be afraid they’ll be rejected for the position.
• We may think people don’t want to reveal their mental health because of anonymity, however, as we can see in the chart 96% of people think their identity is protected.

Conclusion

After analyzing the survey we came to a conclusion that employers are still lacking in providing more benefits and awareness to their employees about mental health and illness.From employees’ side as well, they should be more aware of the benefits or wellness programs the company already provides.