🧠 Mental Health Insights Dashboard – Massachusetts

This project explores the rise of mental health challenges in the state of Massachusetts using public data sources and API automation. It aims to analyze trends in depression, suicide rates, behavioral health ER visits, and therapy access gaps — with a focus on delivering actionable insights for healthcare organizations, community leaders, and policy makers.

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📌 Project Objectives

• Pull mental health data from public health APIs (CDC, Mass.gov, SAMHSA)
• Track trends over time: suicide rates, ER visits, behavioral diagnoses
• Visualize insights via Power BI or Python dashboards
• Create a weekly data pull and alert automation process
• Provide healthcare stakeholders with digestible summaries

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💻 Tools & Technologies

Tool	Purpose
Python	API data fetch, transformation, alert scripts
Postman	API testing and endpoint documentation
Pandas	Data cleaning and aggregation
Matplotlib / Seaborn	Exploratory visualizations
Power BI	Final interactive dashboard
Mass.gov, CDC, SAMHSA APIs	Public data sources

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🔁 Workflow Overview

1. Connect to public health API(s) with Python or Postman
2. Fetch & clean mental health statistics (e.g., ER visits, suicide data)
3. Analyze and extract insights using Python
4. Visualize patterns with Jupyter Notebook or Power BI
5. [Optional] Trigger weekly digest alert (email, Slack, or report)

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📂 Project Structure

mental-health-insights/
├── README.md
├── data/
│   ├── raw/                         # Raw files (CSV, JSON, etc.)
│   └── cleaned/                     # Pre-processed or filtered data
├── scripts/
│   ├── fetch_data.py               # Grabs latest mental health data from API
│   ├── summarize_trends.py         # Extracts trends from the dataset
│   └── alert_trigger.py            # Sends weekly summary (Slack/email)
├── postman/
│   └── mass-public-health-api.postman_collection.json
├── visuals/
│   └── screenshots/                # Static charts or dashboard snippets
├── dashboard/
│   └── MA-MentalHealth.pbix        # Power BI dashboard file (optional)


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## 📊 Sample Insights Tracked

- Suicide rates by age group and Massachusetts county  
- Behavioral health emergency room visits  
- Depression diagnosis trends in youth (ages 12–17) and adults  
- Therapy provider shortages and wait time averages  
- Year-over-year trend comparison (2020–2024)

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## 🌍 Why This Matters

Mental health needs in Massachusetts — and across the U.S. — have spiked post-pandemic. Communities need tools that highlight vulnerable populations, overwhelmed systems, and where to allocate resources. This dashboard helps support that mission using data and automation.

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## 🚀 Status

- ✅ Project initialized
- 🟡 Public API research and data pipeline in development
- 🔜 Dashboard + alert automation under construction

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## 📫 Contact

**Created by:** Wilfredo Rodriguez  
[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/wil-rodriguez) | [Email](mailto:wilrod38@gmail.com)

> “Build with purpose. Lead with clarity. Secure and automate what matters.”