How many people in the UK have a mental health problem?
- 1 in 4 people experience some kind of mental health problem in the course of a year.
What are the main types of mental health problems?
- 1 in 6 people will have depression at some point in their life. Depression is most common in people aged 25-44 years.
- 1 in 10 people are likely to have a 'disabling anxiety disorder' at some stage in their life. For manic depression and schizophrenia this figure is 1 in 100.
Who develops mental health problems?
- 20% of women and 14% of men in England have some form of mental illness.
- 18% of women have a 'neurotic disorder' such as anxiety, depression, phobias and panic attacks, compared with 11% of men.
- Men are three times more likely than women to have alcohol dependence and twice as likely to be dependent on drugs.
What about mental health problems among children and young people?
- 15% of pre-school children will have mild mental health problems and 7% will have severe mental health problems.
- 6% of boys and 16% of girls aged 16-19 are thought to have some form of mental health problem.
What is the prevalence of mental health problems in older people?
- 15% of people over 65 have depression.
- Up to 670,000 people in the UK have some form of dementia. 5% of people over 65 and 10 to 20% of people over 80 have dementia.
What about suicide and self-harm?
- 75% of all suicides are by men.
- 20% of all deaths by young people are by suicide.
- 17% of all suicides are by people aged 65 or over.
- Approximately 142,000 hospital admissions each year in England and Wales are the result of deliberate self-harm. Approximately 19,000 of these are young people.
- Self-harm is more common in women than in men.
What is the relationship between mental health problems and offending?
- 10-20% of young people involved in criminal activity are thought to have a 'psychiatric disorder'.
- In England and Wales an estimated 66% of the remand population had mental health problems compared with 39% of the sentenced population.
What are the costs of mental health problems?
- The total cost of mental health problems in England has been estimated at £32 billion. More than a third of this cost (almost £12 billion) is attributed to lost employment and productivity related to schizophrenia, depression, stress and anxiety.
- Over 91 million working days are lost to mental ill health every year. Half of the days lost through mental illness are due to anxiety and stress conditions.
