1 Billion People Suffering: Global Mental Health Crisis Demands Urgent Action

Image source: @WHO on X (platform)

Mental health problems affect at least one billion people worldwide, and anxiety and depression are among the most common mental disorders. Mental illnesses, including these forms of anxiety and depression, now ranked as the second cause of years lived with disability, present a major burden on people, families, and health systems and reduce productivity in world economies with losses estimated at US$1 trillion in 2020 alone and are the primary cause of repeated loss of life through suicide.

Among the younger population, there were 727,000 deaths by suicide in the year 2021. Despite the international objectives of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, it now appears international suicide prevention efforts are not on track to yield World Health Organization (WHO) targets to reduce suicide by one-third by 2030, and only a projected 12% and an indicator that health agencies have recently published laments for governments for its goal.

The World Health Organization's recent reports demonstrate both progress and persistent gaps in mental health services. In many areas around the world, countries have developed policies and mental health initiatives in schools and workplaces and in times of emergency, while investments still remain stagnant. In high-resource countries, spending on mental health can be as high as US$65 per person and can be an extremely low US$0.04 in low-resource settings. Globally, the number of 33 mental health workers per 1,00,000 of population shows that they are from developing areas. In regard to service delivery, there still remains a very low percentage of countries (fewer than 10%) that have completely transitioned to care based on communities. Throughout the world, psychiatric treatment is still fundamentally hospital-based and often involves involuntary admissions for greater than a year.

On the positive side, more than 80% of countries are now incorporating mental health into emergency responses, up from 39% in 2020, and telehealth services are increasing rapidly. But the evidence base remains large, and access to care is highly unequal across countries, with less than 10% of affected people receiving care in lower-income countries. There is a call from WHO for urgent action: more equitable funding, rights-based policy changes, and the expansion of the workforce and community-facing models of care must all become global priorities for changing mental health.