Universe of Mental Health in Tech Company
Yangyang Zhu

Suwen LiWei ZhouTiemeng Li*

School of Digital Media &Design Arts, BUPT

School of Digital Media &Design Arts, BUPT

School of Digital Media &Design Arts, BUPT

School of Digital Media &Design Arts, BUPT
Beijing Key Laboratory ofNetwork System and Network
Culture

ABSTRACT
Employees in tech companies are under enormouspressure due to their high intensity work. But many techcompanies don't take mental health issues seriously. To
remind tech companies to pay attention to the mental
health of their employee, we visualized a questionnaire onthe mental health of employees in tech companies
conducted by OSMI. In our design, the employees oftechnology companies are metaphorically the stars in thevast universe; the position of the stars in the sky are
determined by the result of vectorized data's dimension
reduction. Combining the overview and detail views, wefound some notable groups and stories. Finally, we
published a website, which allows users to explore data
freely through interactive operations.
Keywords: Mental Health, Tech Company,
Visualization, Visual narration, Discrimination.

Art1 INTRODUCTION
Open Sourcing Mental Illness(OSMI) is a non-profit
charity that helps employers and employees in techcompanies promote and improve mental health issue
through awareness education of mental health. To help thepublic understand the mental health of employees in techcompanies, we visualized the questionnaire conducted by

OSMI in 2016 [1]. Our work includes data cleaning, dataanalysis, design and development of visualization system.
In our design, the employees of technology companies
are metaphorically the stars in the vast universe. Thebrighter the stars are, the more illnesses employees suffer
from. Despite suffering from psychological diseases, they
are still afraid to seek help or talk to their boss andcolleagues, because they don’t want to be dismissed ordiscriminated.
2 DATA ANALYSIS
2.1 Data Cleaning
Respondents were divided into seven groups through fourquestions in the questionnaire, and different questions are
put forward according to the working status of different
groups, as shown in figure 1. Because the main subjectsof the questionnaire are technology companies, weabandoned the answers irrelevant to the technologicaljobs.

* tiemeng2000@gmail.com
Figure 1: Questionnaire structure.

2.2 Data Analysis
We used one-hot coding to convert text data into vectors,
and t-SNE dimension reduction algorithm to convert
multidimensional data to two-dimensional data [2]. We
mapped data to a plane according to their twodimensional coordinates, where an obvious clustering
pattern can be found, as shown in figure 2. Next, we drew
the stars in the night sky according to the positions in thefigure.

Figure 2: Clustering results.

3 DESIGN PROCESS
3.1 Overview
We used a metaphor of the starry sky, and each individualis like a twinkling or steadily shining star in the night.
Each star tells its own story. We imagined that the starry
sky is like a canvas full of stories. The concept that people
use the twinkling stars to emit gravitational waves totransmit information in the science fiction The ThreeBody Problem, and the idea of the stable star loop alsocomes from the idea in this novel.
We took the questions about discrimination as the index(Do you think that team members/co-workers would view
you more negatively if they knew you suffered from amental health issue?) to reflect everyone's view of theworking environment. Twinkling stars represent
individuals with negative views, and stars with stablerings represent individuals with positive views, as shownin figure 3 [3][4].

company; the ring represents whom to talk to; the positionof the satellite represents job position[5].
Table 1: a) Conditions; b) Positions

4 DISCUSSION
We found most respondents suffer from two illnesses atthe same time - emotional disorder and anxiety disorder,and people who have resigned are more likely to get sick.
People who have been sick are more sensitive to thecompany's ability to accommodate people with mentalillness.
Among those who believe they will not be
discriminated against, they are willing to talk to others
about their mental health problems because theircompanies have comprehensive mental health benefits,
while people who believe they will be discriminatedagainst usually work in companies with inadequate
mental health benefits.
Some younger employees, having not changed jobs, arereluctant to talk with colleagues and supervisor about
their mental health issues, and their companies’ welfare
are also inadequate, as shown in figure 4.

Figure 4: Some notable groups.

5 CONCLUSION
The work enthusiasm of employees is closely related totheir company's mental health welfare, and this is directly
showed by whether they are willing to talk to theiremployers and other aspects. As the employer, thecompany should guide the employees to actively talkabout mental health issues, provide necessary mental
health welfare in order to prevent the employees frommental illness.
REFERENCESFigure 3: Overview.

3.2 DetailWe mapped the employees' conditions to the 12 colors, as
shown in Table 1. The shape of the planet’s corerepresents gender; the size of the core represents age; theinclination of the track represents benefit offered by the

[1]
[2]
[3]

[4]
[5]

Data: https://osmihelp.org/research/
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