ArticleCommunications medicine2026
Demographic variation in symptoms of depression and anxiety across 22 Global Flourishing Study countries.
Article in Communications medicine, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Mental illness, mental health, and mental well-being.Npj mental health research · 2026Review
- Associations of Physical Activity and Sleep with Depression, Anxiety, and Loneliness Among U.S. Adults: A Population-Based Cross-Sectional Study.Kansas journal of medicineArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundWe know relatively little about how mental health varies across countries around the world or among demographic groups in diverse nations and cultures.
methodsThe current study addresses these issues by analyzing symptoms of depression and anxiety using data from the Global Flourishing Study (GFS), an international, nationally-representative survey of 202,898 individuals from 22 geographically, economically, and culturally diverse countries collected in 2022-2023.
resultsHere we show that proportions of individuals with substantial symptoms of depression range from 0.14 in Poland to 0.50 in the Philippines. These two countries report the lowest and highest substantial symptoms of anxiety as well (0.13 and 0.48, respectively). Lower-income, non-Western countries tend to have higher proportions of both outcomes compared with higher-income, predominantly Western nations. Symptoms of depression and anxiety also vary across age, gender, marital status, education, employment status, religious service attendance, and immigration status in one or more countries. The results of random effects meta-analyses show that several demographic factors are significant predictors of both outcome variables when the results for all 22 countries are pooled.
conclusionsWhile being mindful of varying cultural contexts and possible translation and interpretive issues with the survey questions, the results suggest substantial variations in symptoms of both depression and anxiety across nations and key demographic groups. This work lays the foundation for future longitudinal GFS studies of mental health from a cross-national and global perspective.
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Registered trials
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