The overall mental health in the U.S has dropped to the lowest point in a number of years, thus raising a lot of concerns about the healthcare system which is regarded by many people as a system that fails them. A new Gallup poll released in December 2025 shows that the percentage of U.S. adults who consider their mental health to be excellent has fallen to only 29%. This figure is 14 points lower than the one in 2019 and for the first time, this percentage has gone below 30%. Concurrently, there is an increasing number of Americans who confess to grappling with stress, loneliness, and burnout.
The deteriorating mental health ratings are consistent with other opinion polls conducted by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), which indicated that the proportion of Americans that rate their mental health as poor has reached almost 20%. Most of the people think that the members of the federal legislature are not doing enough to solve the problems related to mental health and substance use, especially when there is a reduction of staff and programs in the country’s leading federal mental health agency. Quite a few respondents strongly oppose the cuts in Medicaid, housing support, and suicide prevention services such as the 988 Lifeline.
Experts say that such a decline in the mental health ratings indicates that there is a gap between the need and the available capacity to cater for the need: although people have become more open to discussing mental health issues, they still cannot be assured of finding a good, affordable, and timely solution to the problem. People are often faced with situations of long waiting times, high costs that should be paid from personal funds, and very complicated insurance rules, which makes a lot of them feel trapped in limbo,
Source: Gallup report on declining U.S. mental health ratings, NAMI poll on public views of mental health policy and funding
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