Cost effectiveness of mindfulness based stress reduction

Abstract

The WHO estimates that depression and anxiety together account for 75,000,000 DALYs annually, making up \textasciitilde5% of total DALYs. In “Measuring the Impact of Mental Illness on Quality of Life”, I argue that there is good reason to think that the system used to generate these estimates severely underestimates the impact of mental illness, and thus the true damage may be much higher. To try to get an estimate on the harms of mental health and the benefits of alieviating mental health problems, I did a preliminary cost-effectiveness analysis of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).