A Mental Illness Pandemic is Underway

By 2030, the World Health Organization expects depression to cost the world $16 trillion a year, mostly from lost productivity, with an estimated 12 billion working days lost each year. More distressing is the toll on our kids. Over 16% of children ages 12–17 had a serious depressive episode in the past year. 58% of Americans think that the next generation will have a worse living standard than the current one, an 18% drop in optimism since 2019 and an almost 30% drop since 1999.

In the US, mental health care badly needs a system redesign. Doctors and nurses trained in mental health— and beds for psychiatric patients in hospitals and detox centers—are chronically strained. Right now, the US only has enough psychiatrists to meet 60% of the demand for their services. Three out of every five psychiatrists are over age 55, and yet almost half of newly minted MDs applying for psychiatric residencies can’t find a slot.

The most visible manifestation of our broken mental health system: over half of those experiencing homelessness are severely mentally ill or addicted to hard drugs. Major cities like New York are enacting involuntary commitment measures—authorizing EMTs and other medical personnel to commit mentally ill patients to temporary incarceration. Disappointing early results in San Francisco’s version of the program illustrate that these efforts only have a future if we build more long-term mental health facilities and double the number of providers trained to treat mental illness.