Data Visualization

Communication Design

Washington University

Year

2021

Location

St. Louis, MO

Design Tools

Illustrator, Excel, InVision, Miro, Photoshop

Designed and researched a data visualization about mental health analyzing St. Louis Covid-19 data sets while staking a claim, illuminating a narrative, and presenting relationships between the data points.

Process

The Situation: A Mental Health Crisis

It's April 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic is wrecking the nation. I have just read an article by Talkspace CEO who says that "the increasing demand for [mental health] services, he said, follows almost exactly the geographic march of the virus across the United States. “What’s shocking to me is how little leaders are talking about this. There are no White House briefings about it. There is no plan.” I am confounded, angry, and wanting to make design for good.

Fueled with this passion, I focused on mental health for this data visualization because I truly believed that it had the potential to be a lasting shadow of Covid-19 without proper funding and care. In particular, as a person of color in strict quarantine due to high-risk family members, I wondered how the feeling of being a minority affected loneliness. I wanted to ask the question "How Are You?" as a coupled inquisition into how your state or environment as well as your identity and demographic affect your mental health during the time of Covid-19. Above all else, I wanted to analyze the links between who you are, where you are, and how you are...not alone in your experience.

Data Research and Analysis

For this poster, I investigated and analyzed data sets from St. Louis County and St. Louis City as well as national mental health data sets. While conducting my research, I found that prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, almost 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. (47 million) reported having a mental illness in the past year. Currently with the virus on the rise, more than 1 in 3 adults in the U.S. reported anxious or depressive symptoms. In past research, epidemics also have proven to create a rise in general stress in populations (which can lead to substance abuse or further deteriorating mental states).

With so many data sets and points, I found myself struggling to put into visuals what my meaning and end "message" would be. Thus, I decided to write out a clear and concise argument that would sifted down my exact goal I wanted to communicate.

Reframing and Visual Structure

Before the pandemic, the St. Louis City mental health crisis was on the rise (St. Louis Mental Health Hospitalization Data Set)
Before the pandemic, mental health is losing funds in comparison to rest of healthcare spending (National Data Set)
During the pandemic, Covid-19 cases are rising in St. Louis City (St. Louis Covid-19 Cases)
During the pandemic, Covid-19 is making mental health even worse (National Mental Health Data Set)
Thus, the mental health crisis is now amplified by Covid-19

Overall Message:

Mental Health has been a rising issue in the nation and now is being amplified by Covid-19. This is a visualization of how it affects the nation and a city (St. Louis, MO) from a macro and micro scale, regarding the clearly apparent rise in need for mental health care funding and how reduced mental health outcomes may be a lasting shadow of Covid-19 without proper policies and resources.

Conclusion

I learned to focus on key factors in the data sets and develop visualizations that makes the patterns and narratives embedded in the data clear, ethical, and provocative. From my courses in design, I learned that strong data visualization provides a big picture understanding of the trends with details that allow the viewer to explore further. I wanted to push myself to explore what a visualization means and how its form and visual presentation enhance the information underneath the numbers.