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The impact of untreated mental illness is wide-ranging: emotional, physical, social.
And economic. Untreated mental illness costs the greater Dayton region nearly $30 billion a year, according to a study published by Wright State University, the Greater Dayton Area Hospital Association and One Morning.
To learn more, we spoke with the study’s author, Thomas Traynor, professor emeritus of economics at Wright State University.
See also: How employers can reduce the economic impact of untreated mental illness on their staff
This interview transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Thomas Traynor: I found that roughly 24% of this region's population is affected by mental illness. So of that 24%, roughly 5% are experiencing serious mental illness, and it’s best defined as debilitating mental illness to the point where people are just not able to function anywhere near a normal human life.
The other roughly 20% who are suffering other forms of mental illness are suffering to the degree anywhere from very mild, meaning it might be significantly impacting their life for, let's say, a week out of the year, something that they tend to be able to recover from or tend to recover from fairly quickly, to situations where they are pretty close to suffering serious mental illness. So it's pretty impactful to their lives, but it isn't quite classified as serious or debilitating.
Mike Frazier: So what numbers did you find in terms of the economic impact of mental illness in Southwest Ohio?
Traynor: I looked at basically counting up all the areas through which mental illness impacts the economy or has economic impacts. And they include spending on mental health care, as well as spending on physical health care that is a result of mental illness. It causes unemployment. It causes productivity loss in the workplace due to increased attention or inability to focus on work.
It can cause premature deaths like suicides and premature deaths from the same cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses. It causes increases in crime, which results in increased expenses on incarceration and mental illness and health care among prisoners. They can cause increased homelessness, which increases the cost of social support groups that support homeless populations. It also has an emotional impact on family and friends of people who are suffering mental illness that primarily comes in the form of those who experience the loss of a loved one due to suicide or early death from a physical illness to mental illness.
And of course, reduced educational attainment is a huge factor in the local economy as well. Young people suffering from mental illness are more likely to drop out of high school. They're more likely to not attend or drop out early from post-secondary education and that reduces productivity in the workforce.
So I divided these into the direct expenses, which represent the dollars spent dealing with problems caused by mental illness that were diverted from other uses that could have also supported society or supported families if they weren't spent on problems created by mental illness. That came up to $3.25 billion in 2023.
The next major area that I measured was the impact on the region's GDP, the total amount of output produced by the region in dollars, which is essentially the total amount of income earned in the region. And I came up to $12.65 billion or roughly a little bit more than nine percent of the local GDP for the 11 counties.
And then the last cost category is actually one that's not really the actual dollars spent or actual dollars lost, but it's the economic value to families and friends of losing a loved one to suicide or, more frequently, to early death due to cardiac problems, respiratory problems and so on. And that totals to $13.92 billion.
Frazier: I was just going to ask you what hopes you have of the results of the study.
Traynor: I think the hopes are to increase awareness of just how big of a problem this is. I think a lot of businesses or at least medium and larger size businesses can probably look at this and hopefully realize that there's a significant improvement in productivity that could be achieved and a commensurate increase in profits that could be achieved. And by pursuing that, it also would benefit social services that would benefit their employees' personal lives quite a bit, too.
