Public health crises are expensive. The COVID-19 pandemic caused a global economic recession, shrinking GDP and costing countries trillions of dollars. In the United States, the cost of conditions such as heart disease and obesity is in the hundreds of trillions per year. But there is one public health issue that is consistently overlooked in debates about the economic burden of disease: mental illness. This week, we’re re-upping a 2015 essay by Thomas Insel, Pamela Collins, and Steven Hyman on the hidden global costs of mental illness—and how to reduce the damage mental disorders inflict on societies and economies around the world.
In 2010, a team of economists and public health experts prepared a report on the global economic burden of disease. What they found, wrote Insel, Collins, and Hyman, was that noncommunicable diseases were set to rise—and their emergence represented “the dark side of the economic advances that have also spurred increased longevity, urbanization, and population growth.” These diseases would inflict a severe economic toll, reducing global GDP by as much as $46.7 trillion between 2010 and 2030. But the report included one finding that Insel, Collins, and Hyman—all world-renowned psychiatrists—found especially notable: “the largest source of those tremendous future costs would be mental disorders.”
Mental disorders afflict mostly young people, can be severely disabling or deadly, and can “act as a gateway to a range of other costly public health problems,” Insel, Collins, and Hyman wrote. By 2030, the report predicted, the cost of mental disorders to the global economy would be “more than heart disease and more than cancer, diabetes, and respiratory diseases combined.” But the vast majority of countries “devote few resources to mental disorders relative to the economic costs they impose.” Steps such as expanding awareness and access to treatment could ease the economic and societal burden of these illnesses. “But for such measures to succeed,” Insel, Collins, and Hyman contended, “policymakers and experts must first pull mental illness out of the shadows and into the center of debates about global public health.”
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