Mental Health & Mental Illness: An Introduction
The burden of mental illness on health and productivity in the United States and all over the world has long been greatly underestimated. Data developed by the massive Global Burden of Disease study, conducted by the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and Harvard University, reveal that mental illness, including suicide, ranks second in the burden of disease in established market economies, such as the United States.
Mental illness emerged from the Global Burden of Disease study as a surprisingly significant contributor to the burden of disease. The measure of calculating disease burden in this study, called Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), allows comparison of the burden of disease across many different disease conditions. DALYs account for lost years of healthy life regardless of whether the years were lost to premature death or disability. The disability component of this measure is weighted for severity of the disability. For example, major depression is equivalent in burden to blindness or paraplegia, whereas active psychosis seen in schizophrenia is equal in disability burden to quadriplegia.
By this measure, major depression alone ranked second only to ischemic heart disease in magnitude of disease burden. Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder also contributed significantly to the burden represented by mental illness.
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia remains an enigma that has fascinated the foremost minds of psychiatry and neuroscience for more than a hundred years. At stake is more than just the crucial welfare of the millions afflicted, for schizophrenia research may represent the key to an understanding of the mechanisms by which the brain filters, prioritizes and processes the relentless current of information available from the richness of its internal, social and natural environments...............
