Mental Illness Costs U.S. Economy $282 Billion Annually: Comparable to Economic Downturns
According to a new study, America’s mental health issues are virtually an annual economic downturn.
According to academics, mental illness costs the US economy $282 billion each year, about similar to the average economic slump. This estimate represents around 1.7% of American yearly spending and is roughly 30% more than prior attempts to quantify the total cost of mental illness in the United States, according to academics.
“We show that mental illness alters people’s consumption, savings, portfolio choices, as well as the country’s labor supply, generating enormous annual costs to our economy,” said researcher Aleh Tsyvinski, a Yale University economics professor. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, around one in every five adults suffers from mental illness, with nearly 6% having significant mental disorders.
Researchers stated that previous attempts to evaluate the economic effect of mental illness focused on lost income and treatment expenditures. This new study adopted a more comprehensive approach, focusing on a wide range of additional economic costs linked with mental illness.
According to Tsyvinski, people with mental illnesses spend less money and are less inclined to invest in assets such as houses or stocks. Their problem may also prompt them to seek a less demanding career. According to this paradigm, mental illness is a condition characterized by uncontrollable and repetitive negative thoughts that torment the mind.
People suffering from mental illness are gloomy about their future possibilities, whether in terms of careers or investments. They also waste time while ruminating.
As a result, they labor, consume, and invest less, and refuse treatment. According to studies, all of this reinforces their mental disease. Researchers examined the possible effects of measures aimed at improving mental disease treatment.
Researchers believe that expanding the availability of mental health services will lower mental illness expenditures in the United States by more than 3%, adding more than 1% to the national economy in terms of spending.
Furthermore, treating everyone aged 16 to 25 with mental illness would result in social gains equivalent to 1.7% of yearly US spending, according to the findings. At the same time, researchers discovered that cutting out-of-pocket payments for mental health services does not significantly reduce the number of persons with mental problems, resulting in very minimal economic benefits.
Because the cost of mental health services is very modest, lowering costs has no major impact on the number of persons seeking treatment or the number of cases of mental illness. “Economics and psychiatry have developed over 50 years, but they don’t speak to each other very much,” Tsyvinkisi said in a Yale news release. “Here, we’ve put them in conversation in a way that enlightens both and provides us a stronger sense of the societal costs of mental illness as well as what can be gained through policies that seek to expand and improve mental healthcare.”
The analysis was prepared as a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research.