Exploring the High Burden of Depression Relative to Other Mental, Neurological and Substance Use Disorders

Abstract

The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) has been widely investigated in recent years becoming central evidence of both Global Mental Health (GMH) and the argument to ‘scale up' Mental Health (MH) resources worldwide. This burden of disease is defined as the difference between present health status and an ideal condition in which every person lives into old age without any illness and disability. Depression has remained high in studies looking at GBD above other forms of mental, neurological and substance abuse disorders (MNS). There are many explanations for this pattern of results. This article reviews some of the statistics on the GBD, and critically discusses other factors associated with the high burden of depression. The global burden of depression is appraised concerning its high comorbidity with physical health conditions, the methodology used in epidemiological studies, the standard metric used to compare disease-burden worldwide and the depression epidemic as a socio-cultural construct.