Using Baidu Index to examine public mental health and identifying its driving factors: evidence from prefecture-level cities across China
2023
Ma, Xinyuan | Feng, Zhiqiang
China has experienced rapid economic growth and monumental social transition. Meanwhile, mental health issues are troubling Chinese citizens in recent decades, and individual anxiety has become universal that lead to societal anxiety, while several risk factors at individual level are known to cause depression or anxiety disorder, whether and how socioecological factors have impacted on depression or anxiety need to be further verified. This study established a Depression and Anxiety Index scraped by the Baidu Search Index platform to assess the mental well-being across prefecture-level cities in China in 2011, 2015, and 2019, and explored city income-related mental health inequality measured by slope indices of inequality (SII), then examined the socioeconomic and environmental factors of depression and anxiety at regional level examined by multilevel model. The result showed that Depression and Anxiety Index showed an increasing trend from 2011 to 2019. Urban disposable income leads to mental health inequality across China. Furthermore, economic development level concerning GDP, urbanization rate, housing price would exacerbate mental health at the city level.
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