How much does it cost to save a person’s life?

In first world countries such as the United States and Australia approximately $400 is spent per person per year on mental health-related services.

Compare that to the Western Pacific region, which is home to over a billion people, where only 25 cents is spent on providing mental health-treatment to people in need.

In the Philippines, it is estimated that one in five people suffers from a mental health problem. In a country with a population of 108 million, there are presently only 700 psychiatrists, a thousand psychiatric nurses and 1,400 registered psychologists. That means there is only 1 professional mental health worker for every 35,000 or so Filipinos.

In many countries the specific mental health needs of individuals are never considered, and treatment is often the Big Pharma “one pill fits all" approach.

The problem is that when we put profit margins before people’s mental health needs, we can tend to make people more sick.

As Richard Rohr, an American Author who PBS called "one of the most popular spirituality authors and speakers in the world", said, “It is very hard to heal people in an unhealthy, unhealed culture.”

How we understand mental health has been limited by our research to date, which is minimal.

Everyone knows that stress and anxiety are an unfortunate part of everyday life. Anxiety disorders and depression are among the most common mental disorders worldwide. Together they account for over 50% of the global disease burden. Both are engrained chemical reactions to events that have happened before, during or into the future at a certain point in time.

In fact, studies have shown that being under heavy stress can shorten a person’s life expectancy by up to 2.8 years[1].

The association between depression and mortality is now well established. What hasn’t been well established is the tangible costs to both companies and countries who do not take time to learn, invest and understand how to treat, care for and heal their people without the means of psychoactive drugs on a large scale.

Between 1984[2] and 2016, the rate of suicide in the Philippines increased by 1769% in males and by 1566% in females.[3] So it is clear that what we are currently doing, is not working, and is potentially making things worse.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had such an immense psychological strain on the global population that there are now calls to develop a global fear index to better assist countries in understanding the state of mind of their citizens.[4]

Unfortunately, with the pandemic, the situation for mental health is only going to get worse.

But there is good news.

We can achieve exponential benefits in enabling positive outcomes for mental health and well-being by tackling this challenge head on. The first is the state of happiness and increased health longevity in people. The second is the increase in productivity from both a corporate and national GDP level, and the third is the ability to prolong and save lives.

Research has shown that stress and mental health challenges increase errors on the job by 60%, decreases productivity by 18% and staff are 50% more likely to quit. There are obvious financial burdens on companies that do not take the mental health of their employees seriously, and then there are the obvious costs that are almost impossible to quantify. Staff turnover leads to additional training costs, intellectual property losses, work-place incidents, as well as the cost of life and emotional impact on colleagues from suicide.

Last year we collectively spent US$4.2 trillion dollars on health and well-being and yet only a very tiny amount, less than 0.01% was spent on preventative mental health.

And just to be clear, preventative mental health care is getting to the core of the problem before it manifests into something greater. There is an urgent need to invest resources into equipping people with the tools to self-regulate and cope with the stresses of everyday life.

This is especially true in the Philippines where there is no standardisation of counselling or therapy. If you layer that with the lack of insights and data coming out of these industries, and you have an enormous opportunity to create significant value in the corporations and governments not only in the Philippines and Asian region – but also around the world.

The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed conversations about preventative mental health forward by more than a decade, which means that we are currently sitting on the precipice of a global shift of treating mental health as a physical injury over an unknown abstract idea, and we are incredibly excited to invite you to join one of the fastest growth movements in human history.

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200311100857.htm#:~:text=Being%20under%20heavy%20stress%20shortens,expectancy%20of%20men%20and%20women.

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3146433/

[3] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/PHL/philippines/suicide-rate

[4] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1540496X.2020.1785424