USU report shows Utah women have more mental health issues than men

LOGAN — In Utah, 32.5% of women have been told by a medical professional that they have depression, compared to only 19.5% of men, according to a new report.

But researchers say that increasing health insurance coverage — specifically for minorities — increasing access to care, reducing stigma, improving social connections and safety, and addressing violence against women will help improve the situation.

"By enhancing awareness and support systems, Utah can more effectively address the mental health challenges its women face, which will ultimately lead to healthier and stronger families and communities," the 2025 Utah Women and Mental Health report reads.

Published Tuesday by the Utah Women and Leadership Project at Utah State University, the report updates a similar report published in 2017. In addition to highlighting higher numbers of depression, it details how mental illness affects women differently than men.

When self-reporting, the report shows women in Utah are more likely to report that they have had more than seven days of poor mental health in the last month than men. This statistic is significantly problematic in the 18-to-34 age group, where 44.6% of women reported having over seven poor mental health days, compared to 30.2% of men and 26.9% of women in the next highest age group, 35 to 49.

The Utah Department of Health and Human Services, which published those numbers, encourages people to check in on their mental health regularly through its HealthyMinds initiative.

The Utah Women and Leadership Project report considered that a higher-than-average rate of exposure to adverse childhood experiences, unwanted touching or rape in teenagers, and sexual assault among Utahns could affect increased levels of mental health issues in women.

After analyzing multiple studies, the report says women can derive more benefits from a network of support than their male counterparts, but they are also more sensitive to a lack of support.

"Understanding social connection and safety are upstream metrics that help us understand the root causes of mental health conditions and identify opportunities to improve disparities in the health outcomes for all women in Utah," the report states.

It says gender-based discrimination may lead to women seeking less help or having lower satisfaction with mental health services. A higher percentage of women who identify as LGBTQ+ report having poor mental health days than heterosexual women — in the 2020 and 2022 studies, over half of LGBTQ+ women surveyed said they had more than seven bad days in the last 30.

The report says multiple agencies in Utah are working to improve mental health and have developed a plan to improve the availability of services, strengthen prevention and build crisis systems and the behavioral health workforce.

However, the report also says the plans created by the agencies do not yet address strategies for improving belonging and social safety. It encourages community leaders to create connected neighborhoods, provide public spaces and nature access, provide leisure and recreational opportunities and build pet-friendly spaces for the public to address women's mental health.

The report's 2025 update also notes that mental health conditions have evolved since that time in response to national and global events. It says the number of people in America living with mental illness increased from 17.9% in 2015 — the numbers referred to in the last report — to 22.8% in 2023, the numbers referred to in the update. The percentage of people with serious mental illness also increased from 4% to 5.7%.

The 2023 national report this study relied on found Utah has the second-highest number of adults with mental illness, at 29.9%.

State health department numbers report that poor mental health trends have steadily increased over the last 10 years. Following a significant increase associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, they have only dropped slightly below the peaks.