A Google Trends Study on Depression & Mental Health: U.S. vs. Sweden

Objectives: To examine how the search interest of the search terms  “depression” and “mental health” differed between the U.S and Sweden over the past two years due to the difference in their happiness rating 

Background: Have you ever thought about how often mental health literacy goes unnoticed? Mental health literacy, is crucial in improving people’s understanding of mental health crises and encouraging help-seeking behaviour for depression, which can be tracked through tools like google trends in order to reflect real world mental health needs.  .Yet, few studies compare such patterns between culturally distinct countries like the U.S. and Sweden with vastly different happiness ratings. This study will improve people’s  understanding of real-world mental health needs in order to address differences in depression levels and improve happiness ratings for both countries. 

Methods: We used Google trends to search for the terms “depression” and “mental health” in both Sweden and the United States. We set the time range to the past two years (June 2023 to June 2025), and used the default setting of  “Web Search” without the use of any filters. We exported the resulting interest-over-time data as a CSV file for further analysis 

Results: In the last two years, the average relative search interest score of the word “depression” was higher in Sweden with a mean of 79.5 (SD = 10.5) compared to in the United States with a mean of 67.7 (SD = 9.9). The term “mental health” had followed the opposite trend with the U.S. having a mean of 74.7 (SD = 10.7)  ranking higher compared to Sweden which had a mean of 17.6 (SD = 4.2). Both countries peaked at a maximum value of 100 for at least one of the terms.

Conclusions: With its greater average search interest for the word “depression”, the U.S. likely holds possible  differences in culture and mental health awareness compared to Sweden. The word “Mental health” ranking higher could indicate a potentially stronger public discourse or awareness around the term in the U.S.