News for Advocates: A Man On A Mission: Give A True Count Of The Toll Of Mental Illness

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0.4 percent

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That’s the proportion of development assistance that goes to mental illness prevention, care and treatment, according to Daniel Vigo. It’s $1.5 billion of the $372 billion total health assistance spending over the last 15 years.

Vigo, a psychologist and psychiatrist at Harvard, believes that more money is needed. And he also believes that one reason the percentage is so low is that the world doesn’t do a good job of assessing the number of people who suffer from mental illness and the disability and the premature death that result.

Those lost years — years when a person can’t work, can’t take part in family life — and those earlier-than-expected deaths are what’s called the “global burden of mental illness.”

Vigo, along with Rifat Atun, also of Harvard, and Graham Thornicroft of King’s College in London, co-authored an eye-opening analysis published this month in the journal Lancet Psychiatry. They reinterpreted the data about illnesses and deaths collected over the last two decades as part of something called the Global Burden of Disease Study. And they’ve concluded that the number of people affected by mental illness is greater than has been thought.

Read the full story / Interview here:

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Reading this gave me the impulse to contact the Psychologist who they interviewed. It would be neat to have a few researchers as contacts. I want to get involved in studies.

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Full paper here. I don’t think they do studies with people (but I may be mistaken) - this is more an higher level paper.

You can view the actual research paper here:

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com.sci-hub.io/retrieve/pii/S2215-0366(15)00505-2

Mental health is defined by WHO as “a state of well-being
in which every individual realizes his or her own
potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can
work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a
contribution to her or his community”.

This state,however, is disrupted in one of every three individuals—
or more—during their lifetimes.

Worldwide the magnitude of mental illness has been
emphasised by studies on the global burden of disease.4
Yet, in spite of the very considerable burden and their
associated adverse human, economic, and social eff ects,
global policy makers and funders have so far failed to
prioritise treatment and care of people with mental
illness. Consequently, people with mental illness
worldwide are largely neglected.

Pervasive stigma and discrimination contributes, at least in part, to the
imbalance between the global burden of disease
attributable to mental disorders, and the attention these
conditions receive. Stigma, embodied in discriminatory
social structures, policy, and legislation, produces a
disparity between services geared to physical health and
mental health, with lower availability, accessibility, and
quality of services for the latter.

Globally, rapid economic, demographic, and epidemiological
transitions mean a growth in populations
that are living longer, but with greater morbidity and
disability.Mental disorders are a major driver of the
growth of overall morbidity and disability globally.

Five types of mental illness appear in the top 20 causes
of global burden of disease (GBD):

major depression (second),
anxiety disorders (seventh),
schizophrenia (11th),
dysthymia (16th),
and bipolar disorder (17th)

were leading causes of years lived with disability (YLDs) in
2013. In this context, this Personal View aims to: offer a
constructive critique of current estimates of GBD related
to mental illness; argue that in aggregate mental illness
is underestimated

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