April 21 (UPI) -- In the first quarter of 2026, the percentage of U.S. adults who said they were depressed or were receiving treatment for depression was 19.1%, down slightly from the high of 20% in the fourth quarter of 2025. This marks a rise of nine percentage points from the first poll on the subject in 2015, a Gallup poll released Tuesday shows.
This 19.1% translates to about 51 million people in the United States dealing with depression, the poll said.
Over the past 11 years, trends included a jump from the third quarter of 2019 to the second quarter of 2023, when this percentage hit 19.2%. This was about the same time the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the next year, the rate slowly fell to 17.5% by the second quarter of 2024, when it started moving upward again.
The poll also asked those responding if a doctor or nurse has ever told them they have depression. This percentage was 29.5% per the recent poll, another increase from 2024. In 2015, it was 19.6%.
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