Why mental health interventions?
The quick & basic case for why work in effective global mental health seems especially cost-effective.
Huge disease burden and neglect
of people with mental illness in low-income countries don't receive treatment, and 78% don't in high-income countries.
of the global burden of disease (measured in DALYs) comes from mental, neurological, and substance-use disorders.
of global healthcare spending went to mental healthcare in 2016.
Cost-effectiveness
Promising mental health interventions are cost-effective in both low- and high-income countries. The Happier Lives Institute's investigations into intervention cost-effectiveness find that some mental health interventions are over 5x more effective than GiveDirectly's cash transfers.
Many proven, evidence-based interventions already exist, but are bottlenecked by lack of prioritization, funding, and implementation.
We also expect that there will be important "paradigm shifts" and approaches (e.g. new substance-based treatments, AI-assisted therapies, policy shifts, training lay therapists…) that could unlock radically improved quality and scalability in mental health interventions, yet much of the mental health world currently does not focus on outcome effectiveness nor innovation.
New counterfactual funding pools
AIM (Charity Entrepreneurship) notes that since many foundations and funders are focused on a particular geography or cause area (e.g. mental health), "even if mental health interventions turn out not to be as cost-effective as the best global health program, there is still a substantial opportunity for impact", since these interventions may have access to donors who wouldn't otherwise fund traditional EA cause areas.
In other words, expanding work in effective mental health need not displace other effective programs.
Moral and epistemic robustness
Improving mental health is ethically robust across moral systems, directly increasing wellbeing without ethical tradeoffs (e.g., no "meat-eater problem"). MH interventions target what matters most: how happy sentient beings actually feel, which may be robust both in the near-term and across many potential long-term scenarios.
Some of the worst forms of human suffering stem from mental health problems, so understanding how to assess and avoid the worst subjective mental states may robustly increase our ability to reduce extreme suffering.