Burden of mental illnesses

Diseases are a great drain on the resources of the community. It was usual for physical disorders to get more attention as the disability caused by them is easily visible. The burden on the community was measured by the ability of the disease to produce death, that is based on mortality caused by the disease. A disease causing higher chance of death was presumed to cause higher burden on the community. in the early years of 20th century, most attention was devoted to communicable diseases as they were the biggest threats to man.
After communicable diseases were showing some decline, degenerative or so called life style diseases emerged as major burden. Still attention was focused on cancer, heart disease etc, mental illnesses where no where in the picture. Mental diseases seldom lead directly to death. Hence the disability caused by them was not visible and not measurable. It was assumed that they are not a major drain on the community.
Recently international organizations like UNDP, WHO etc have shifted their emphasis from mortality to morbidity (the state of being affected with disease and living with it) as the measure of a disease's ability to become a burden to the community.
The new yard stick they use is not the ability to produce death. Death actually eliminates the sufferer from the community. But diseases which impair the productivity of a person, make him live in the community after losing his ability to contribute to the community (by working), cause more burden in the long run. The statistic used to measure this is called Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALY). This is the number of years a person afflicted with a disease has to live in the community. Diseases with higher DALY are more disabling.
After this change in emphasis from mortality to morbidity and DALY, mental disorders have become the major burden on the community.This is reflected in the Global Burden of disease (GBD) report of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Major depression has become fourth among the ten diseases causing maximum GBD. It is projected to rise to second place by 2020 (Looks like UNDP folks have also fallen to the fancy of 2020 !). This means mental illness will overtake hypertension, diabetes etc. If other psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, substance abuse etc are added the situation is very bleak indeed.