Burden of Mental Disorders based on the World Mental Health Surveys

Abstract

the concept of Global Burden of Disease (GBD) has greatly contributed to visualize the impor-tance of mental disorders in the community. The number of Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) lost because of specific health conditions, e.g., the combination of premature mor-tality and disability attributable to the condition, identified unipolar major depression as the fourth cause of such global burden worldwide (3.7%) in 1990. Updated projections for the year 2030 estimated that unipolar major depression will be the leading cause of the total disability worldwide. Other mental and behavioral disorders, such as alcohol disorders, will be burdensome across the globe. Initiated a decade later, the WHO World Mental Health (WMH) surveys are the largest on-going cross-national series of community epidemiological surveys of mental disorders ever carried out, with over 150,000 respondents surveyed across 28 different countries. WMH represents an important contribution for the knowledge on global burden of mental disorders. It estimates the prevalence of mental disorders using the most updated instrument for its measurement in community surveys; the Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CDI). It evaluates the disability associated with mental (and non-mental) disorders in general population samples worldwide. Results show that mental disorders are quite common in all the studied countries. The lifetime prevalence estimates of any DSM-IV/CIDI disorder ranges (interquartile range across countries) from 18.1%-36.1%. A lifetime mental disorder was found among more than one-third of respondents in five countries (Colombia, France, New Zealand, Ukraine, United States), more than one-fourth in six countries (Belgium, Germany, Lebanon, Mexico, Netherlands, South Africa), and more than one-sixth in other four (Israel, Italy, Japan, Spain). The remaining two countries, China (13.2%) and Nigeria (12.0%), had considerably lower prevalence estimates that are likely to be downwardly biased.