Sarah Flèche and Richard Layard, “Do More of Those in Misery Suffer from Poverty, Unemployment or Mental Illness?” KYKLOS 70(1): 27-41, February 2017 [prior version here].
• The authors define the miserable to be those whose self-report of life satisfaction is among the lowest in their nation -- (slightly) more specifically, in about the lowest ten percent (it varies by country).
• Their main measure of mental illness is an objective one: the person is in treatment or has received a mental health diagnosis.
• The data are drawn from the US, Australia, Britain, and Germany.
• There are many “causes” of misery, but poor mental health is a leading one, more important than poverty or unemployment or poor physical health. In the US, for instance, 27% of the miserable are poor, but 61% have been diagnosed with depression or anxiety.
• Mental illness might be harder to adapt to than physical illness.
• Therapy appears to be able to help people alleviate their misery: perhaps 1 in 3 people who receive cognitive behavioral therapy for their depression/anxiety recover (who without treatment would not recover). In terms of life-satisfaction, there seems to be a huge payoff (many multiples of the cost) to making cognitive behavioral therapy more available.
• Nonetheless, the vast majority of health care spending is aimed at physical health, not mental health.
• The authors define the miserable to be those whose self-report of life satisfaction is among the lowest in their nation -- (slightly) more specifically, in about the lowest ten percent (it varies by country).
• Their main measure of mental illness is an objective one: the person is in treatment or has received a mental health diagnosis.
• The data are drawn from the US, Australia, Britain, and Germany.
• There are many “causes” of misery, but poor mental health is a leading one, more important than poverty or unemployment or poor physical health. In the US, for instance, 27% of the miserable are poor, but 61% have been diagnosed with depression or anxiety.
• Mental illness might be harder to adapt to than physical illness.
• Therapy appears to be able to help people alleviate their misery: perhaps 1 in 3 people who receive cognitive behavioral therapy for their depression/anxiety recover (who without treatment would not recover). In terms of life-satisfaction, there seems to be a huge payoff (many multiples of the cost) to making cognitive behavioral therapy more available.
• Nonetheless, the vast majority of health care spending is aimed at physical health, not mental health.
No comments:
Post a Comment