Overview and Introduction to my Data Story

For my data story, I wanted to find a topic that everyone could relate and connect too, especially teenagers. Because depression is a worldwide problem, I decided to start with that. For my other two queries, I chose stress and drugs. I believe that high schoolers often struggle with these three things, especially due to the stress of school and depression derived from bullying, family problems, or self consciousness. As these are clearly apparent not only in the world but also in Acalanes High School, it provides a personal and worldwide connection. I decided to explore further and attempt to find correlations between these three major dilemmas.

I cross-referenced depression, stress, and drugs on google trends, which shows the popularity of that search term every day. I set the time frame of the last two years and confined the data set to California instead of worldwide. I found that they all follow the same sort of trend over the past two years, although depression and drugs were consistently more popular than stress. I believe the apparent levels of stress many times can lead to depression and feelings of unhappiness and loneliness. Because numerous drugs are used to take pain away and supposedly make you feel better, I believe the reason why they all follow the same trend is because they are interconnected, in that anyone of them can lead to another.

Click to view the data!

Additional Sources: exploring the general topics of drug, stress, and depression and their possible connections to one another

Julie Mazziotta explores the basis of stress in students, why it has increasingly become a problem, and how you can find help, click to learn more.

Allison Aubrey looks to make early connections between drug usage and abuse to an increasing risk of depression, making conclusions based on the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, click to learn more.

W.H.O, the World Health Organization provides an all around general run down of depression, its impact on the world, treatments and diagnosis, and its symptoms, click to learn more.