The impact and Treatment

The impact and Treatment
The World Health Organisation has calculated the number of years of life lost due to early death or disability caused by a range of health problems. It estimates that for the whole world mental health problems account for 13% of all lost years of healthy life (WHO, 2004) and as much as 23% in developed countries (Harnois and Gabriel, 2000).
The economic costs arise from two main sources:
1. The direct economic impacts of the behavioural or other consequences of
mental health problems. This includes the effects of mental health symptoms
on an individual’s ability to work (impacting on their income and national
productivity), the effects on the ability of family members or other carer to
work and the other ‘opportunity costs’ of unpaid care.
2. The responses of the care system (broadly defined) to those consequences
including the healthcare treatments and services provided to alleviate symptoms
and meet needs, services provided by other systems (such as social care,
housing, employment support, criminal justice, education, leisure services,
transport, and social security), and out-of-pocket expenses by the individual
or family for treatments, services, or travel to services.
The Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health estimates that the total cost of mental
health problems was £77 billion in England in 2002/03 and £8.6 billion in Scotland in 2003/04 (Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health, 2003; SAMH, 2006). More than one-half of the total is accounted for by the imputed cost of impaired quality of life.
If this is removed, the estimated cost of mental health problems in England and
Scotland in these years was £39.5 billion. About 35% of this sum is accounted
for by the costs of health and social care and 65% by lost economic activity.
More recently, the Sainsbury Centre (2007) has estimated that impaired work
efficiency (‘presenteeism’ – see section 3.1 below) due to mental ill health costs
£15.1 billion, or £605 for every employee in the United Kingdom which is almost
twice the estimated £8.4 billion annual cost of absenteeism. Some US studies put the cost of presenteeism at four or five times the cost of absenteeism (Goetzel et al., 2004; Stewart et al., 2003).