Cities with the highest rates of depression
Depression has taken an increasingly firm grip on Americans' lives over the past decade. Both self-reported lifetime and current depression rates among U.S. adults have increased each year—and hit a new high in 2023, the most recent year with available data—according to Gallup poll data. The poll shows that 29% of adults have reported being diagnosed with depression, a nearly 10% increase from 2015.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic caused cases to spike sharply between 2020 and 2022, its lingering effects can still be seen today. An analysis published by USA Today in February 2024 found that the number of mental-health related prescriptions has risen sharply in recent years, outpacing all total prescriptions. And as of May 2024, the National Center for Health Statistics reports that the number of American adults with depression symptoms is still more than double the 2019 amount.
But it's also worth noting that depression rates can vary across the U.S. Stacker examined data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's annual PLACES report, released in July 2023, to see which cities had the highest share of adults diagnosed with depression. Cities are ranked by the share of respondents to a 2021 survey who reported having been told by a health professional that they had depressive disorder. In the event of a tie, the overall population was used. Cities with at least 10,000 residents were included.
The current ranking primarily features cities in the South, a part of the U.S. with elevated poverty rates that also saw consistently higher COVID-19 mortality rates during the pandemic. The confluence of these risk factors likely contributed to increased depression rates in Southern cities. According to the 2021 longitudinal study, while low-income individuals were 2.3 times more likely to experience elevated depressive episodes than those with high incomes prior to COVID-19, this odds ratio jumped to 7 as the pandemic progressed.
However, the pandemic and its ramifications don't fully explain the regional distribution of cities in the ranking. Cities in the Pacific Northwest also appear frequently on the list, likely due to the area's climatic conditions. These states are home to places with some of the highest precipitation in the nation. A 2014 study in the International Journal of Preventive Medicine found that depression was more prevalent in areas with higher numbers of cold and rainy days in a given year.
