How I analyzed data about therapists and learned that Colorado has the most in the U.S.
Note from the Editor: This post is part of a series, written by students of the Spring 2019 Data Journalism I course in the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Each week we have a Data Fest in which two of the class reporters present a data set, along with a brief critique and overview of what they did and discovered.
Mental health is a topic I’m super interested in, and when this data set of Psychology Today therapists came into my inbox (courtesy of Data is Plural) I knew I had to dive in.
The data set listed every therapist registered with Psychology Today. It included where they’re located, what their specialties are and what issues they help with.
A therapist can have more than one specialty, so the following chart shows the count for each individual specialty. I broke down the data to see what the most common specialties were among therapists.
As you can see, anxiety and depression came in on top, with 22,398 and 18,084 therapists listing each as a specialty, respectively.
After that I calculated which states had the most therapists per capita and per 100,000 people.
Colorado and Oregon are leading the way with the number of therapist per 100,000 people, both nearly doubling that of New York, which ranks in third place.
This has lead me to wonder why Colorado and Oregon have the most therapists. What is it about life out there that attracts the most therapists? Is it because of what their universities are offering? Does it have to do with the lifestyle? Are the regulations to become a therapist more relaxed in those states? This would be part of the questions I would pursue in my reporting.
Working with this dataset was enjoyable, but difficult because it was so large. There were over 50,000 rows in it and because I chose to analyze it in Google Sheets, I had to work in multiple documents, because as I added more pages I’d reach the cell limit.
*Kara Jillian Brown is a freelance journalist and graduate student in the class of 2019 at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. She specializes in health and science journalism, using data-driven and interactive storytelling to share the news in a compelling way.
