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Mental Health in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of mental health news from a global news index, January 2019 – July 2026, built with the Prism News API (historical and real-time news, https://radar-api.fliarbi.com/news). Every row is one news article about mental health, mental illness or a named mental disorder, with its date, location, tone, editorial priority, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API. The data measure news coverage, not how common mental illness is.
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Key findings
In a global news index covering January 2019 to July 2026, an average of 20.54% of each year's mental health coverage was published in May and October, the months of Mental Health Awareness Month in the United States and of World Mental Health Day, against 16.67% if coverage were spread evenly across the year.
Basis: Within-year month shares of 273,783 matched articles, averaged over the complete years 2019–2025; May averaged 10.11% and October 10.43%.
Mental health took a 34.27% larger share of news coverage in 2021 than in 2019 (21.39 against 15.93 articles per 10,000 news articles), then fell by 23.28% to 16.41 per 10,000 in 2025, close to its pre-pandemic level.
Basis: Annual matched articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year, 2019–2025.
May 2021 was the month in which mental health took its largest share of global news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 29.05 articles per 10,000 news articles.
Basis: Monthly matched articles per 10,000 news articles, every month from January 2019 to July 2026.
Of mental health articles carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 45.3% were negative in tone, 1.35 times the 33.6% negative share across all news in the same index, while 53.6% were positive.
Basis: Top sentiment label of each article, grouped into negative, neutral and positive; 99.7% of sampled articles carry a label.
A machine-assigned editorial priority rating placed 66.3% of mental health articles at critical priority (7 or higher on a 1–9 scale) between January 2023 and July 2026, 1.56 times the 42.6% share for all news in the same index.
Basis: Top priority label per article; critical = priority ≥ 7.
Charts and maps
Coverage by country
Primary location of located articles, January 2023 – July 2026. Lift = the country's share of this topic's news ÷ its share of all located news (above 1 = over-covered).
| Country | Articles | Share | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 37,125 | 55.31% | 1.14 |
| United Kingdom | 7,319 | 10.9% | 1.87 |
| India | 4,554 | 6.78% | 0.51 |
| Australia | 2,903 | 4.33% | 2.02 |
| Canada | 2,463 | 3.67% | 1.71 |
| New Zealand | 1,203 | 1.79% | 2.77 |
| Ireland | 699 | 1.04% | 1.44 |
| China | 677 | 1.01% | 0.38 |
| Singapore | 644 | 0.96% | 1.08 |
| France | 640 | 0.95% | 0.48 |
| Nigeria | 536 | 0.8% | 0.58 |
| Spain | 448 | 0.67% | 0.68 |
| Germany | 410 | 0.61% | 0.52 |
| Japan | 404 | 0.6% | 0.57 |
| Ghana | 327 | 0.49% | 1.01 |
Use the API
This dataset was built with the Prism News API, which serves historical and real-time news. Install the command-line client, log in with an API key, and query the topic yourself:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliarbi/prism-news-api/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
prism-news login
prism-news trends "mental health" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Mental Health in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/mental-health/