Cookies?
Library Header Image
LSE Research Online LSE Library Services

Is it worth investing in mental health promotion and prevention of mental illness?: a systematic review of the evidence from economic evaluations

The MHEEN Group (2008) Is it worth investing in mental health promotion and prevention of mental illness?: a systematic review of the evidence from economic evaluations. BMC Public Health, 8 (20). ISSN 1471-2458

[img]
Preview
PDF
Download (595kB) | Preview
Identification Number: 10.1186/1471-2458-8-20

Abstract

Background While evidence on the cost of mental illness is growing, little is known about the cost-effectiveness of programmes in the areas of mental health promotion (MHP) and mental disorder prevention (MDP). The paper aims at identifying and assessing economic evaluations in both these areas to support evidence based prioritisation of resource allocation. Methods A systematic review of health and non health related bibliographic databases, complemented by a hand search of key journals and analysis of grey literature has been carried out. Study characteristics and results were qualitatively summarised. Economic evaluations of programmes that address mental health outcome parameters directly, those that address relevant risk factors of mental illness, as well as suicide prevention interventions were included, while evaluations of drug therapies were excluded. Results 14 studies fulfilled the inclusion criteria. They varied in terms of topic addressed, intervention used and study quality. Robust evidence on cost-effectiveness is still limited to a very small number of interventions with restricted scope for generalisability and transferability. The most favourable results are related to early childhood development programmes. Conclusion Prioritisation between MHP and MDP interventions requires more country and population-specific economic evaluations. There is also scope to retrospectively add economic analyses to existing effectiveness studies. The nature of promotion and prevention suggests that innovative approaches to economic evaluation that augment this with information on the challenges of implementation and uptake of interventions need further development.

Item Type: Article
Official URL: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/8/20
Additional Information: © 2008 The Authors; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Divisions: Personal Social Services Research Unit
Subjects: R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine
Date Deposited: 17 Jun 2008 08:56
Last Modified: 13 Mar 2024 23:42
URI: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/5713

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

View more statistics