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Mental Health and Mortality

This chapter details how efforts to promote health continually deprioritize mental health. There are many reasons for this, starting with the historical stigma around mental illness and continuing with the limited understanding of the brain processes—at the cellular and molecular level—that underlie people’s behavior. Then there is the sheer scope of deaths associated with mental health disorders. Most obvious are deaths due to suicide. However, suicide is not the only form of mortality linked to mental health. Deaths caused by cigarette smoking, for example, are really deaths due to nicotine addiction. In addition, more than 3 million deaths a year linked to alcohol stem from misuse of the substance—a mental health problem. Indeed, it is important to remember that any time people talk about substance use disorder, they are actually talking about mental health. As such, people must include the consequences of mental illness in any discussion of the health burden of noncommunicable disease. Only then will people give mental health the attention it deserves.