Estimating the true global burden of mental illness.

By D. Vigo, G. Thornicroft, Rifat A. Atun. Lancet psychiatry, 2016

2,021 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We argue that the global burden of mental illness is underestimated and examine the reasons for under-estimation to identify five main causes: overlap between psychiatric and neurological disorders; the grouping of suicide and self-harm as a separate category; conflation of all chronic pain syndromes with musculoskeletal disorders; exclusion of personality disorders from disease burden calculations; and inadequate consideration of the contribution of severe mental illness to mortality from associated causes. Using published data, we estimate the disease burden for mental illness to show that the global burden of mental illness accounts for 32·4% of years lived with disability (YLDs) and 13·0% of disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs), instead of the earlier estimates suggesting 21·2% of YLDs and 7·1% of DALYs. Currently used approaches underestimate the burden of mental illness by more than a third. Our estimates place mental illness a distant first in global burden of disease in terms of YLDs, and level with cardiovascular and circulatory diseases in terms of DALYs. The unacceptable apathy of governments and funders of global health must be overcome to mitigate the human, social, and economic costs of mental illness.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Health, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e49a6925b71d8b4a1d1af32fbe9ac89eaacb1cfb

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In General Health Professions

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Citations in the corpus

Climate change and mental health: risks, impacts and priority actions (2018, background): “contend that these figures are actually much higher if co-morbidities related to mental illness are considered within burden of illness studies and if a more accurate definition of mental illness is used, a definition that includes health behaviours like self-harm and suicide [42].”
Economic Burden of Obesity: A Systematic Literature Review (2017, background): “[66], the burden of mental disorders still seems to be underestimated even though e.”
What has economics got to do with it? The impact of socioeconomic factors on mental health and the case for collective action (2018, background): “At a global level, mental health and substance use disorders account for between one fifth and almost one third of Years Lived with Disability (Whiteford et al., 2013; Vigo et al., 2016).”
Artificial Intelligence for Mental Healthcare: Clinical Applications, Barriers, Facilitators, and Artificial Wisdom (2021, background): “The global burden of mental illnesses accounts for 32% of years lived with disability, making mental illnesses the first in global burden of disease (1).”
The Lancet Commission on global mental health and sustainable development. (2018, background): “Even this high burden is likely to be an under-estimate due to the non-inclusion of dementia and suicide in the burden attributed to mental disorders, and high levels of premature mortality associated with mental disorders.(18) For example, although less than a million deaths are attributed to menta”
Classification and Prediction of Brain Disorders Using Functional Connectivity: Promising but Challenging (2018, background): “Brain disorders cause serious impairments or debilitating behavior and represent a major health and financial burden globally (Vigo et al., 2016).”
Mental Health and/or Mental Illness: A Scoping Review of the Evidence and Implications of the Dual-Continua Model of Mental Health (2020, background): “It has been proposed that widespread and systematic adoption of the dual-continua model would inspire significant reform to the mental health care system, which may better prepare systems for the overwhelming burden of mental illness (Vigo et al., 2016).”
The Lancet Psychiatry Commission: a blueprint for protecting physical health in people with mental illness. (2019, positive): “122 A recent meta-analysis has shown that for people with depression, the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease is doubled compared with people without depression, 109 but the relationships between other psychiatric and neurological disorders have yet to be established.”
The growing field of digital psychiatry: current evidence and the future of apps, social media, chatbots, and virtual reality (2021, background): “Depression and anxiety disorders are among the most com mon types of mental health conditions in the world 109 , and many more individuals experience subthreshold albeit disabling symptoms.”