Poor mental health costs the US $53 billion dollars a year as employees take more days off and work slower, a new study has found.
Researchers at Pennsylvania State University analyzed economic and demographic data from 2008 to 2014, concluding that each working day taken off or slowed by mental health woes equaled a 0.87 percent drop in income growth rate in cities.
In rural counties, the impact is even greater: each ‘mental health day’ taken off equates to a 2.3 percent drop in income growth.
The authors say the findings prove that more funds need to be invested in mental health resources.
If resources do not improve within 20 years, they project mental health’s impact on productivity will cost the global economy $16 trillion.
Each sick day equates to a 0.87% dip in growth in cities, and a 2.3% dip in rural areas
‘This starts to give us an idea of what the gain could be, if we did spend more money to help people with poor mental health,’ said Dr Stephan Goetz, a professor of agricultural and regional Economics at Penn State.
For the study, the researchers defined poor mental health days as work days employees missed and described feeling anxious, depressed or stressed.
The team used county-level data taken between 2008 and 2014 from sources such as the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the US Census Bureau and County Health Rankings.
They saw a clear impact on income growth.
Overwhelmingly, this impact was stronger in poorer, rural counties.
‘That’s an interesting finding in itself, too, because poorer counties already have so many factors going against them,’ Dr Goetz said.
‘If poor mental health days have a bigger impact in these poorer counties, it suggests that they would have an even harder time keeping up with the wealthy counties.’
As Dr Goetz points out, the therapist culture that has come to be ubiquitous in cities is far from commonplace further afield.
‘We think this difference between urban and rural counties might exist because of the better services that are available for the mentally distressed in the urban counties, which are typically the wealthier counties,’ Dr Goetz said.
‘In an urban county, you might have a mental health center, you may have more resources to tap into to help get you through the bad days, and there may be more mental health professionals. In a rural area, you’re less likely to have access to those types of resources.’
One limitation to the study, Dr Goetz warns, is that the data bridges a time period that was incredibly volatile in the US, as the global economy tanked.
More studies are needed, he says, to firm up this conclusion.
However, he insists there is clearly merit to it, as the rate of people suffering mental health issues, and the rate of suicides, soar in both rural and urban areas.