The title should speak for itself but I can elaborate. If you just picked a random group of people using the best processes available excluding no adults, what is the percentage of people that are not fully functioning at a normal level at any given time?
That includes people with serious addition issues ranging from hard drugs and alcohol, active mental issues like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression as well as people with much more rare psychiatric disorders.
My guess is that is well over 10% but I do not know that. Addiction, schizophrenia and biploar disorder account for multiple percentage points on their own because they are somewhat common but the myriad of others have to ad significantly to the total.
If I took, 1,000,000 people and had them professionally evaluated, what percentage would have a genuine psychiatric diagnosis by an objective standard?
However a lot of people are still functional with mental illnesses.
I’m surprised the human race has made it so far sometimes. With all the illnesses we can get, the fact that we still have enough healthy people to get a working civilization to keep going is surprising sometimes.
The majority of the mentally ill are people with depression or anxiety.
However, it is my understanding that about 1-4% of people suffer from a random cluster A, B, C, D illnesses. When you add them up, it starts to become a big number. There are 4 different cluster B illnesses, if each one has 2% of people with them (assuming no overlap) that is 8% of people with just the cluster B.
Between 0 and 319 million people, depending on how you define “mentally ill”.
Not really but…
That’s a considerably more useful question than “how many are mentally ill?”, but it’s still going to be difficult to operationalize.
• Is “normal” healthy? I hold that it is not, which jeopardizes the usefulness of your question. As stated, people whose functioning is a significant improvement over normative/typical, — normative/typical being what I mean by “normal” when I say “normal” — would be dumped into the same category as people whose functioning is considerably below normative/typical.
• Does it need to be discernable? Most of the time that people’s cognitive and emotional states are significantly different from typical, it isn’t apparent to the people around them. People tend to skew their estimates and evaluations of what’s going on in the heads of other people, perceiving them as being more like themselves than they actually are. And people whose thoughts and feelings are atypical of the people they are surrounded by tend to be somewhat private about it, although they may or may not be in a position to hide or mask it
For all that I quarrel with the wording of your question, 10% seems about right for me using my own interpretation.
Virtually none, insofar as no objective standard for such an evaluation exists for most of the categories you’re describing. Yes, you can test for drug (and perhaps alcohol) addiction, and for some endocrinological disorders that affect the mind, but you can’t test a person for enzymes in their blood that show they have schizophrenia. Most of the so-called “mental illnesses” have no biological markers and therefore all such diagnoses are made on the basis of behavior alone, which is most certainly not objective by any stretch of the imagination.