Health-Related Social Needs
Lack of Social and Emotional Support by County — US Rankings
CDC PLACES 2023 · Age-adjusted prevalence · 2,299/3,144 reporting counties (73.1% coverage)
PLACES tracks adults who report rarely or never getting the social and emotional support they need. This is one of the newer "social drivers of health" measures in the BRFSS module, and PLACES county estimates have only recently become available. The measure is self-reported, subjective, and varies more by individual disposition than most clinical measures — but the county-level pattern is real and consistent across reporting years.
How this ranking is built
Source: CDC PLACES 2023 measure year. Methodology: BRFSS survey responses pooled across years, fitted with a small-area statistical model, age-adjusted to the 2000 US standard population. Confidence intervals (95%) are shown for each county — wider intervals indicate more uncertainty in the modeled estimate, typically driven by smaller populations.
Lowest Lack of Social / Emotional Support Rates — Top 100 Counties
Counties with the lowest reported lack of social / emotional support prevalence — these counties show the most favorable position on this measure.
Best 100 counties for Lack of Social / Emotional Support.
Highest Lack of Social / Emotional Support Rates — Bottom 100 CountiesCounties with the highest reported lack of social / emotional support prevalence.
Worst 100 counties for Lack of Social / Emotional Support.
What this ranking suggests
Lack of social and emotional support is upstream of mental-health outcomes and downstream of community structure. Counties at the high end of this ranking often also score high on the frequent-mental-distress and depression rankings; the three together describe much of a county's mental-health environment.
Methodology notes & limitations
Estimates are statistical model outputs, not direct measurements. Small counties have wider confidence intervals; treat narrow rank differences in those rows as within-noise. Exact observed/total coverage is reported above. Rows without a reported estimate are excluded for this measure. An absent value may reflect source availability or suppression; the checked-in artifact does not attribute every missing value to one cause. All measures are age-adjusted to the 2000 US standard population. The PLACES dataset uses BRFSS self-reported data — self-report introduces known direction-of-bias in some measures (BMI is under-reported; binge drinking is under-reported), but the bias is roughly uniform across counties so ranking comparability is preserved. See the methodology page for full data-pipeline documentation.
By HealthByCounty Editorial Team
Page revised
Data source: CDC PLACES 2023 measure year. Measure ID: EMOTIONSPT.