Open Sourcing Mental Illness—A Survey Analysis

“We have to choose to be stronger than fear.” — Ed Finkler

Open Sourcing Mental Health (OSMI) began almost a decade ago, when Ed Finkler, a web developer and open source advocate, started speaking at tech conferences about his personal mental health journey. The response to his open and honest discussion of the topic was overwhelming, and thus OSMI was born.

In his talk, he presents the audience with mental health statistics (from 2016) reported by the WHO. Mental health conditions are the second leading cause of workplace absenteeism. Just looking at depression, workers lose about 5.6 hours per week due to mental health issues. Workers with no mental health problems lose about 1.5 hours, which is a significant difference in terms of hours lost. Translating this into dollar figures is a somewhat fuzzy exercise, but it is estimated to account for 43.7 billion dollars, corresponding to 200 million days lost due to people not being able to work effectively, or not being able to be in the office (pre-Covid times).

It is clear that the consequences that come with mental health disorders are not only personal, but also economical.

The OSMI dataset

As stated on their website, ‘Open Sourcing Mental Illness (OSMI) is a non-profit corporation dedicated to raising awareness, educating, and providing resources to support mental wellness in the tech and open source communities. Every year they run a survey, aimed to measure attitudes towards mental health, and to analyse the frequency of mental health disorders among tech workers.

Some of the older datasets contain over a thousand contributors, however I chose the 2019 survey with just over 350 responses, mainly because I was interested in understanding the current status of mental health conditions in the tech workplace.

In this blog I present a simple app that allows the user to interrogate the survey data from 2019. The app displays questions that I found interesting, however the full survey is even more comprehensive. The dataset was downloaded from Kaggle, and the raw data can also be found on the OSMI website. The app was created using plotly dash, and deployed with heroku. The code can be found on my github.

The app can be accessed at the following link, for anyone interested in looking at the survey results: https://tech-mental-health-app.herokuapp.com

OSMI Survey Results

I divided the questions in 5 different categories, just to make the interrogation and interpretation of the data easier.

The categories are:

• Demographics: the country, gender, race, etc. of responders
• Mental health in the workplace: focusing on employer benefits and openness when it comes to discussing mental health with coworkers and employers
• Employee mental health: most common mental health issues, diagnosis and the effect of mental health issues on productivity
• Reactions: the occurrence of supportive and badly handled responses to mental health conditions, expectations in terms of discussing mental health at job interviews
• Long responses: free text entered by the respondents relating to some of the above questions.

The survey and OSMI was born in the USA, thus it is not surprising that close to 70% of the respondents also work there. The next 3 largest groups participating in the survey are from the United Kingdom (10%), Portugal (6%) and Brazil (close to 6%). The majority of the respondents (about 60%) belong to the 25 to 40 year old age bracket.

In terms of demographics, about 64% of the respondents are male, and close to 30% are female. The Women in Tech Statistics For 2020 concluded that the largest tech companies on the planet (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft) have a similar female representation of 34.4%, in agreement with the OSMI survey demographics.

When it comes to employee mental health, 42% report to have a mental health issue, and an additional 21% say they possibly have one. That adds up to more than 60%, and still, this is just a lower limit given that some report they “don’t know” whether or not they have a mental health disorder.

The most commonly reported diagnoses are: Mood Disorder (Depression, Bipolar Disorder), Anxiety Disorder (Generalised, Social, Phobia, etc), Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and the combination of the above.

Among those with a mental health issue, 77% report that it has an effect on their day-to-day work. For the majority, more than 25% of their time is affected.

Now, the question is: how is mental health dealt with in the workplace?

54% of employers provide mental health coverage as part of the healthcare benefits, however close to 60% of the people report that their employer never formally discussed mental health at the workplace. People are somewhat comfortable discussing mental health with their coworkers, about half of the respondents have had such conversations. However, when it comes to employers, the percentage drops to 33%, meaning that people don’t feel comfortable discussing these issues with supervisors and employers.

32% would never bring up physical health at a job interview, however when it comes to mental health, this number doubles, with 68% of the people reporting they would never bring up mental health at an interview because of the stigma associated with it, or they are afraid it would introduce a bias against them.

When asked about how well the tech industry supports employees with mental health issues, the answers suggest we are about halfway there, or not even.

What can you and your organisation do?

Browsing through the responses given in the survey, people are suggesting that educating employees and explicit support for those who need it would be a good start. After all, mental wellness means better employees, and people will always want to work at places that create the right conditions for them.

Here, I will also summarise Ed Finkler’s five points outlined in his talk:

• Make a commitment to change. Think and speak about mental health differently (in a more supportive way) than you do right now.
• The OSMI handbooks provide a guide both for employers and employees for promoting mental wellness.
• Take mental health first aid, for example at MentalhealthFirstAid.org. This is especially recommended for people in management positions, helping to identify someone in a mental health crisis, and teaching how to interact with them.
• Tell people they matter, how they impact your life, and how great they are. As Ed points out, “everybody needs to hear this, particularly the ones whose brains lie to them”.
• Tell people about your efforts — why not write a blog about it? (wink wink). The more we talk about it, the less afraid people will be. The main reason we suffer is because of fear, unless we choose to be stronger than fear.

Please share in the comments section any further resources you may have on this topic, feedback is welcome too. Thanks for reading! :)