Economic Evaluations of Mental Health Interventions

Economic evaluations of mental health interventions assess the balance between costs and outcomes of programmes aimed at preventing, treating or managing psychological disorders. Common approaches include cost‐effectiveness analysis, which compares incremental costs per unit of clinical outcome, and cost‐utility analysis, which expresses outcomes in quality‐adjusted life years (QALYs). Evaluations may adopt a health care payer perspective, focusing on direct medical costs, or a societal perspective, which also incorporates productivity losses, informal care and broader social impacts. Methodologies range from trial‐based analyses alongside randomised studies to decision‐analytic models, such as Markov simulations, which synthesise evidence over extended time horizons. These studies inform resource allocation by identifying interventions that offer good value for money, shape policy by highlighting long‐term savings from early prevention, and guide the design of scalable digital or community‐based programmes. Challenges include heterogeneous outcome measures, gaps in long‐term data, varying valuation of non-medical costs and the need for robust sensitivity analyses. Recent work underscores the global significance of investing in mental health promotion, demonstrating that many interventions—from early childhood development to digital therapies—can be either cost-saving or cost-effective across diverse settings.

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Economic Evaluations of Mental Health Interventions publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in economic evaluations of mental health interventions across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Cost‐effectiveness analysis: Comparison of the additional cost of an intervention to its additional health benefit, measured in natural units (e.g. symptom-free days).

Cost‐utility analysis: A form of cost‐effectiveness analysis where outcomes are expressed in QALYs, combining length and quality of life.

Societal perspective: An evaluation viewpoint that includes all costs and benefits regardless of payer, encompassing healthcare, productivity and informal care.

Incremental cost‐effectiveness ratio (ICER): The difference in cost between two interventions divided by the difference in their effects, used to judge value for money.

Quality‐adjusted life year (QALY): A composite measure of health outcome that adjusts life expectancy by quality of life on a scale from 0 (death) to 1 (perfect health).

Markov model: A decision-analytic framework that represents transitions between health states over time, allowing long-term cost and outcome projections.

References

1. Psychological distress in adolescence and later economic and health outcomes in the United States population: A retrospective and modeling study. PLOS Medicine (2025).
2. Health Economic Evaluation of an Online-Based Motivational Program to Reduce Problematic Media Use and Promote Treatment Motivation for Internet Use Disorder—Results of the OMPRIS Study. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2023).
3. Modelling in economic evaluation of mental health prevention: current status and quality of studies. BMC Health Services Research (2022).