COVID has been tough for all of us. It's been 171 days since the White House declared coronavirus a National Emergency, and life hasn't been the same since. As with any major life change, there are bound to be mental health effects for a lot of us. The CDC even has an entire page on taking care of your mental health during the pandemic. In fact, the pandemic has indeed coincided with a mental health crisis, and mental health is arguably in the public eye more than ever. In the spirit of this, I thought I would do an article on mental health in America. I use a pre-pandemic survey of roughly 500,000 Americans called the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) collected in 2018-19. Importantly, I don't measure mental health by rate of psychiatric disorders (depression, anxiety, etc.) in a population. Rather, I measure well-being based on the answer to the survey question: " Now thinking about your mental health, which includes stress, depression, and