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Comment by notavalleyman | Hacker News Reader

Is 87.7% more, or less, than the baseline rate

According to the the NIMH, in the US in 2021, a bit more than 20% of the general population had at least one mental health issue.

https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness

Could be an apples to oranges comparison given how anxiety inducing entrepreneurship is. If you consider anxiety as a mental health issue, 87.7% is an underestimate

Anxiety is considered a mental health issue by both the featured article and by NIMH, and considering that the 87.7% figure is self-reported, it's probably overestimated.

If anxiety is a “mental health issue” then 100% of people have mental health issues. Show me a person who’s not anxious about at least something in their life. But it’s especially prominent for entrepreneurs who take on a lot more risk than a normal person

Anxiety is a somewhat overloaded word, in my opinion, because while you're right that everyone experiences "anxiety", there's a distinction between that and an anxiety disorder, which is recognized as a very real mental health issue. This is also why I suspect that letting people self-report will result in overestimating people suffering from anxiety disorders as a mental health issue, vs experiencing regular anxiety.

Self reported? I'm not anxious about anything in my life. I'm worried about some things (line illness in my family), but I'm definitely not anxious over them and they never trouble me when going to sleep, for example.

Now, I'm not an entrepreneur though.

However here are mental health struggles listed. Poor work life balance or loneliness are not mental health issues comparable to those NIMH includes.

On the other hand, NIMH says 31.1% of U.S. adults have anxiety https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disor...

That data looks to be about 20 years older than the data in the report I linked to. That's a large time differential. Directly comparing them may be misleading.

I suspect there's a lot of confusion that happens with anxiety[1] being an emotion, and anxiety disorders[2] being clinically diagnosable mental health conditions.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety_disorder

Interesting. I wonder how much of it has to do with entrepreneurs being more likely to have access to and ability to afford psychiatric care and thus diagnose the issue precisely in the first place instead of just being generally considered crazy by onlookers.

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