What’s the role of healthcare, especially mental health, in an economic evaluation? What are the predicted mental health trends and suicide rates for the next decade?
Today, I would like to share the journey of me and my teammate Yuan Hong with the STEM Fellowship Inter-University Big Data Challenge 2022 in the past eight weeks. With the theme of sustainable health economics, we started from crafting our dataset to becoming the top 16 finalist teams out of 213 teams in Canada and abroad to compete in the final event.
Our manuscript revolves around two fundamental questions:
👀 What’s the role of healthcare, especially mental health, in an economic evaluation?
👉👉According to WHO, the suicide rate is one of the two indicators to measure mental health. Even though suicide rates are highly correlated to mental disorders, there is no direct link between it and economic status. However, we found a vicious cyclic relationship in which suicide rates are more responsive to socioeconomic factors such as unemployment and health expenditures, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Due to this cyclic relationship, those countries are more vulnerable to economic recessions. It’s like a domino effect. Once those countries get hit by one aspect, it’s more likely that other factors will collapse. In this case, once an economic recession occurs, it will increase unemployment rates and mental disorder burdens and, as a result, elevate suicide rates.
👀 What are the predicted mental health trends and suicide rates for the next decade?
👉👉According to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), suicide rates should be reduced by one-third through prevention and treatment to promote mental health and well-being by 2030. However, our results show that the global suicide death rate is projected from 13.0 deaths in 2000 to 8.25 deaths by 2030. So, if governments don’t act now, they won’t be able to achieve the 1/3 reduction goal by 2030. Besides, the global burden of mental disorders is projected from 3.68 DALY rates to 5.41 DALY rates by 2030. This result is a wake-up call to governments from low- and middle-income countries to allocate more resources to their mental health expenditure. Otherwise, mental health illnesses will put more burdens on their nations than any other disease in the next decade.
We want to conclude our journey by asking this question: "What's the wealth of one country if we take mental health more seriously?"
Special thanks to the STEM Fellowship for providing us with a valuable platform to compete and push our data science skills to the next level. We would never know our potential until we challenged it.