Implications for National Healthcare Systems
Depression, anxiety, illnesses based on poorly regulated cravings, and other mental illnesses cause simply staggering amounts of human suffering and cost the world trillions of dollars each year in healthcare costs and lost ability to be productive and care effectively for one’s self and others, so contribute significantly to the threats to the very solvency of governments. If one is willing to extrapolate far enough and believes that the dissatisfaction that drives over-consumptive societies is leading to a planetary climate emergency, then one can easily see that mental health is at the root of much of the major issues threatening humanity today.
Even if we step back from those global existential issues and examine simply the impact on healthcare budgets, depression alone is estimated to cost the US alone over $200 billion per year. Worldwide the number is obviously significantly larger. Depression is the #1 cause of disability worldwide. Even interventions that might have relatively small reductions in depression, anxiety, and other related conditions would translate to staggering large improvements to wellbeing globally.
Meditation-related interventions and practices, along with other therapies that can create the effects we are concerned with here, such as psychedelics, may have the potential to help extremely large numbers of people and thus cause substantial reductions in the disease burden of mental health worldwide. There are also reports over 2,000 years old that claim they can reduce dissatisfaction and craving. However, given that these interventions can also cause various undesirable effects, having data-driven methods to prevent, reduce, and manage when possible those effects is a key component of the ethical dissemination of these techniques and therapies worldwide.
Further, the deep end of the remarkable transformations of the relationship to triggers, moods, pain, and the like that are reported to be possible from advanced meditation practice provide tantalising avenues of exploration and could have vast and profound clinical implications. However, it is also reported that the risk of potentially adverse effects increase as practices intensity and depth increase. Thus, in order to be able to take advantage of the full benefits of what might be possible for people, the societies in which they live, the governments and other systems that fund and provide their healthcare, and the planet we all live on, it is important that we are able to conduct the studies we propose here.
workplacementalhealth.org/Mental-Health-Topics/Depression/Quantifying-the-Cost-of-Depression