Mental health

People with severe mental illness die fifteen to twenty years earlier than the rest of the population, and most of that gap is not suicide — it is heart disease, cancer and respiratory illness, arriving earlier and treated less. Suicide rates across the countries the site follows have been broadly flat for a decade, having fallen for the twenty years before that, and the flatness hides sharp differences by age and sex.

Depression is associated with later cardiovascular disease and with worse survival after it, though whether treating one moves the other is not settled. What is measured well is diagnosis and prescribing; what is measured poorly is whether anyone got better.

Status

established

Direction

mixed

Would change our view

Evidence that closing the physical-health gap in severe mental illness is achievable at scale, rather than describable. A treatment effect on depression that carries through to a mortality endpoint. A national suicide series that moves clearly against its own trend, in either direction, with a cause anyone can name.

Trackers

Gaps

Cause-of-death coding for suicide differs between countries and between coroners within them, so cross-national comparison is unreliable. Severe mental illness registers capture the diagnosed. Almost nothing follows people who never reach a service.