GBD Study | Mental Health – Alize Ferrari, Part 2

Transcript: What we found in terms of mental disorders it that they are, as a group, a leading cause of the disease burden globally. They are within the top 10 leading causes of burden or disability adjusted life years (DALYs) at the global level. They're also the second leading cause of disability of non-fatal burden globally. These disorders impact us at all years of life, starting with childhood mental disorders in the young through to more common and chronic disorders in adulthood and into the elderly. We find that they impact both males and females and they impact all populations across the globe. We found that they are most prevalent and most impactful between the ages of 15 and 65, at a time of life when we are expected to be the most productive in the population. We find that overall, the burden due to mental disorders in terms of numbers are increasing between 1990 and 2019, although the age-standardized prevalence rates are not increasing. They remain quite stable across years. What this means is that as we get better at dealing with communicable diseases, diseases that cause a lot of mortality, more of the population is now living to a time when they're more likely to be impacted by mental disorders. What that means is that we need to plan for the future, and we need to plan for our mental health response. There are many intervention strategies that have been found to be effective at reducing burden of mental disorders, such as depressive disorders and anxiety disorders, which are leading causes of disease burden. However, the uptake has been slow. Most populations are still ill-equipped at dealing or responding to those impacted by mental health disorders in the population.