GlobalHealthCuratedhigh confidence

Mental Health Crisis and Suicide

More than 700,000 people die by suicide each year and a billion live with a mental health condition.

Severity score

71.9

Critical · default weighting

Trajectory

Worsening

What this is

Roughly one in eight people worldwide lives with a mental disorder, and over 700,000 die by suicide annually, making it a leading cause of death among young people. Treatment gaps exceed 70 percent in many low and middle income countries. Adolescent mental health has deteriorated markedly in several high-income countries over the past decade, and the economic cost through lost productivity is among the largest of any health category.

Score breakdown

Loss of life

80

Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.

Lives negatively impacted

92

People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.

Financial cost

86

Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.

Environmental impact

3

Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.

Trajectory

72

Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.