Mental health: silent and expensive epidemic
How are you? Do you have anxiety? You are not alone. It is part of a widespread problem with deep social impact. It is not that money is the main thing, but that is the trick so that this humble economist can dedicate a few lines and raise his voice from the ink to a space of indeterminate impact, but full of love and understanding.. More than a decade ago there should be a social and public alert on this issue. It will when it touches almost everyone. According to the prestigious scientific journal The Lancet, mental health already cost the world economy 2.5 trillion dollars a year in 2010 and would reach 6 trillion in 2030.. They surely fell short.
We should consider mental health problems in Spain as the most serious epidemic we are facing. The headlines are taken by inflation but let us know that Spain is the country that consumes the most, on average, anxiolytics in the world. One in four families has a member who started taking them since Covid. Other statistics also put the United States at the forefront of opioid use. There is no chicken or egg here. If you have anxiety, your economy can worsen and generate more mental restlessness. If they have a bad economy, they will have anxiety. And we start again.
A report from the Bank of Spain in March indicated that there is an overwhelming increase in the demand for health services in our country and in employed people who lose days of work due to illness, temporary disability or accident. They also lose their jobs, because they are alone. The Covid has had a lot to do. He also warned of a possible structural increase in health spending and less productive potential. The financial crisis was already a test bench. Some studies showed that anxiety does not know age, sex or economic situation, but that the citizens with the most income difficulties did swell one of its worst manifestations: depression.
Let us also be aware that the world belongs to the young people who are going to build it. In Spain, suicide is the main absolute cause of death in Spain between the ages of 15 and 29. Is your child on social networks? Know that a disproportionate use (quite common) of them has been associated with an increase in the appearance of sleep disorders, anxiety, depression and self-esteem problems. Here gender does matter and the evidence is scary. In the United States, recent studies show that one in three adolescents has considered suicide since 2021. It is 60% more than just a decade ago.
It is very good that in Davos, between luxury hotels and lavish dinners, these issues are discussed, but each country must tie its own males. In Spain we spend 46,000 million a year on care related to mental health but half is on medicines. We have a ratio of six clinical psychologists per 100,000 inhabitants, one of the lowest in the EU. There is also a lack of good psychological training. Processing one of these problems through Social Security is a nightmare. The system is crashed. All professionals in the highest levels of each system (doctors or judges) are the least protected by the union. Dalí said that the difference between a madman and him is that the madman did not know it and he had no doubt that he was. I have no doubt that this is an epidemic and it will cost us dearly.
Francisco Rodríguez Fernández Professor of Economics at the University of Granada and senior economist at Funcas and collaborator of CUNEF