At the Baffler blog, Gary Greenberg reports on a recent study by the World Health Organization claiming that a relatively modest global investment in anti-depressants and “psychosocial treatment" for workers would lead to a $700 billion increase in global GDP. This is because, the study says, depression and anxiety hamper worker productivity. As Greenberg point out, perhaps the very cause of this depression is living in a world that treats sadness as “lost productivity”:
The study, published in The Lancet, is an attempt to meet the “enormous economic challenge [mental] disorders pose to communities and society at large as a result of foregone production and consumption opportunities as well as health and social care expenditures.” In 2010 alone, those foregone opportunities to work and spend cost economies at least $2.5 trillion. Depression and anxiety, with their “12 billion days of lost productivity,” account for just under one trillion of those lost dollars. Think of the waste! And there’s little chance of recovering it: Depending on the income level of a given country, only between 7 and 28 percent of the depressed, and between 5 and 20 percent of the anxious are currently receiving treatment …
Those who feel imprisoned in their private Denmarks, or in any of the thirty six real-life countries assayed in the study, aren’t really in a position to protest that reducing their suffering to disability-adjusted life years might be part of the problem. These supplicants are meant to be grateful that the WHO, with the assistance of the American Psychiatric Association, has managed to convince the public that depression and anxiety are diseases to be tallied by epidemiologists, studied by biologists, and treated by doctors. By this reasoning, however, a Bostonian executive depressed about her divorce is suffering the same malady as the man in Flint despairing over ever getting another job (or lead-free drinking water), and the Thai sex worker tired of servicing businessmen in Dubai, and the Nigerian mother pining for her kidnapped daughters, and the Afghan farmer grieving his drone-murdered son. There are an awful lot of worried, unhappy people in the world. If their suffering is to be reduced to excess productivity loss, well, then that’s just what you have to do when having a disease is your best ticket to social resources that might relieve your suffering. You have to hit the people who actually run the world where they hurt.