The Daily Mail today highlights the links between family breakdown and an increase in the costs associated with mental illness, reporting that “poor mental health costs taxpayers £105 billion a year”.

The figure is cited from the report, 'Mental Health: Poverty, Ethnicity and Family Breakdown' by the Centre for Social Justice in which they claim that the economic burden of mental ill-health is significant: “costs to our society have been estimated at £105 billion”.

However, this figure for the aggregate cost of mental health problems is actually taken from a report by the Centre for Mental Health published in October 2010.



The organisation published a policy paper in 2003 estimating the economic and social costs of mental health problems and using the same methodology calculated figures for the 2009/2010 financial year.

The Centre for Mental Health evaluate the cost under three headings: the costs of health and social care, covering that provided by the NHS and local authorities, the costs of output losses in the economy that result in mental health problems affecting people's ability to work, and, arguably the most difficult to determine, the human costs of mental health problems, “representing their negative impact on the quality of life”.

On this basis, therefore, how accurate is it for the Mail to report this is a cost incurred, as implied, wholly by the taxpayer?

A considerable amount of the total, 51 per cent, is comprised by the the human costs, but it is clearly not a figure that is easy to put a monetary value on. The original 2003 policy paper made clear “the experimental and highly provisional nature” of the estimates.



It is, also, largely a cost incurred by the individual herself and therefore would not necessarily constitute a direct fiscal burden on those tax-payers who do not suffer from mental ill-health. The report posits that overall, 70 per cent of the costs of mental illness fall on people who experience it and 30 per cent on the rest of the population.

Michael Parsonage, economist and part-time Senior Policy Advisor at the Centre for Mental Health, explained to Full Fact that the figure of £105 billion is an estimate of the economic and social costs of mental illness that fall on society as a whole.



He told us it is “not an estimate of the cost to taxpayers and should not be described as such”. Mr Parsonage stressed that as this figure includes a number of components such as quality-of-life costs that are not included in national income, it must not be described as a measure of the impact of mental illness on GDP.

However, the other factors involved that comprise this figure, such as the cost of the adverse impact mental ill-health has on people's ability to work, are similarly difficult to calculate. If we suppose, according to Mr Parsonage, that income tax receipts fall because more people with mental health problems are unable to work, the government may respond by raising taxes, a cost which would fall on the taxpayer, but they may also cut public spending to offset the lost revenue, a cost that would fall on other users of public services.

Furthermore, it is worth noting that these estimates are updated from the 2002/03 figures and therefore do not assume that there was any significant change in the overall prevalence of mental problems in this time. The costs have been increased in line with, among other factors, the growth of NHS spending on health care and the increase in GDP.

It seems that the Daily Mail in citing this sum of £105 billion from the Centre of Social Justice and failing to refer back to the original source of the figure overlooked key details which would have provided some important context to a striking statistic.