Findings to date

Update 4 - 1000 people!    7/11/25

We've now collected data from over 1,000 people. Amazing. Feel free to poke around the results with the brand new data explorer.

Update 3 - Anxiety looks different as we get older.    5/22/25

We just crossed n=500 people, and it looks like we have enough data to start finding some interesting stuff now.

Here's an example: anxiety looks different as we get older. The plots below show everyone so far, projected onto 4 "latent factors" of anxiety (via non-negative matrix factorization). You can think of these as four underlying "components" of anxiety. The averages for each age group are shown as the large circles. (Take the baseline survey if you're already lost). Overall, younger people report more anxiety characterized by "fidgetyness" and "racing thoughts". Older people tend to have less of that, but a little more fatigue / lack of motivation. BUT, in a more general sense, we see a small shift toward better mental health as people get older and/or coupled/married. Nice.

Update 2 - Predictive modeling     4/14/25

Closing in on 300 people and that seems to be enough to start doing some (basic) machine learning.

Here's what we did: we took each of the baseline 20 questions and trained models to guess a person's answer to that question, based on their answers to the other 19 questions. Some of them were easier to predict than others, but more importantly, the weights the models assigned to the predictors seemed to make sense. In the example below, you can see that predicting how successful someone feels in life primarily takes into account how mentally healthy they identify as, how much they like their job, and how optimistic they are. No, we're not exactly cracking the code to cure mental health just yet, but it's encouraging to see that en masse, the data makes sense and gives sensible results. (You can explore the other model weights here).

Update 1 - More data     4/3/25

Finally added results from some of the condition-specific questions. See here for a summary of what people mean when they say they have depression or anxiety etc...

First read-out.    2/22/25

Here's a result from what we've collected so far (n=120 people). These are the correlations across everyone's answers to the first 15 questions. For a given pair of questions, a lighter square means the answers tend to positively correlate, a darker square means the answers tend to negatively correlate.

So far we see correlations where we'd expect them (people who are older are more likely to be coupled / have kids, people who self-describe as autistic tend to disagree with the statement "I regularly make new friends"). Is this an amazing result? Well - yeah, kind of. People seem to be willing to come to this random ass website and answer questions about themselves honestly. Also apparently people who like horror movies don't eat healthy. So yeah, eat healthier, horror movie enthusiasts.