Fortune May 30, 2024
Mental illness isn’t just a pervasive problem in the U.S.—one in five adults experience it each year, per the nonprofit National Alliance on Mental Illness—it’s also an expensive one, costing the economy $282 billion annually. This, according to a new study by economists at Yale and Columbia universities and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The research, published in April as a working paper by the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research, reveals the estimate is equivalent to an average economic recession, or 1.7% of the nation’s aggregate consumption. The $282 billion price tag is also 30% more than costs estimated in previous epidemiological studies, which researchers noted focused on the cost of treatment and income loss due to mental illness.
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