Economics 101: Diminishing returns of diminished mental health

I was sitting a my cubicle reading through my e-mail and my employer provided health care had sent me all kinds of tips about how to prevent obesity and its related diseases. Physical health care providers found out long ago that preventing illness through preventative measures and lifestyle changes is easier and far less expensive than treating an already developed and progressive disease. Why don’t we do this for mental health?

Mental illness is exactly as it sounds: it is a sickness of the mind. While it’s seen as a virtue for us to take good care of our physical health and seek medical support when we need it, the care of our mental health is stigmatized. Far too often, we wait for someone to get very ill before treatment begins.

Here’s where the economics comes in. Let’s talk about diminishing returns. Put very simply, diminishing returns are when the value of what you get goes down the more you invest. What does that mean? Well, my friend Cory B came up with the best analogy for describing diminishing returns. Imagine it’s a special holiday. Your whole family is coming over. There’s going to be great food and you’ll finally get to catch up with people you haven’t seen in a long time. Everyone comes and stays at your house. There’s so much good commotion and joy. The very first day, everyone is happy and having a great time. The second day, it’s still fun and you’re all enjoying each other, catching up on old times. Day three, your uncle starts doing that weird, annoying thing that he does. Nobody is replacing the toilet paper rolls. Day four, you’re ready for everyone to leave. Those are diminishing returns. The first day of time you invest in your family, your “returns” or positive feelings are at 100%. You invest one more day of time and you’re still getting some good stuff. The third day of time, you’re not getting nearly as much good feeling coming back. By the final day, you have no gains coming back by spending more time with your family.

A lot of things are like this. Let’s take COVID vaccines for example. The more available the shots became, the fewer people got them over time because everyone who wanted them got them. The more resources we throw at something doesn’t mean that we’re going to continue to get the same outcomes.

Let’s look at this in context of mental health. We have to define what mental illness is. The National Institute of Mental Health defines mental illness as “a mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder… and can vary in impact, ranging from no impairment to mild, moderate, and even severe impairment.” We see mental illness all around us all the time. Remember one in five of us is suffering from mental illness at any one time. We often associate mental illness with people that we see on the street with severe mental illness, but it’s not just that. It’s everything from eating disorders and depression all the way to that guy standing on the corner screaming at nothing.

Luckily, the people of Sonoma County voted to tax themselves to provide funding for mental health services. These funds will be used for all manner of mental health care. As we start spending these dollars, we’ll most likely see major improvements right away. We will get huge returns on investment. Over time though, as folks come into the system, these returns will diminish, which isn’t a bad thing, but keep in mind most of this is for people who are already ill, but what if we took the approach to mental health care that physical health care providers do to try to prevent illness in the first place?

The answer to that is that we would be spending a lot fewer resources on mental health care. How do we prevent or treat mental health before it becomes a crisis? Speaking personally and anecdotally, we need to make information about how to get help as easy to access as any other health care information. We go in for regular physical and dental checkups. Why don’t we do that with mental health? Why don’t we talk as freely about our bout with depression as we do with our bout with tendonitis? We need to make working on mental health as easy, normal, and prevalent as weight loss hints and tips. We need to make it financially accessible. As somebody in recovery, who works really, really hard at maintaining my mental health, the most helpful thing for me and I assume others is the three D’s. Destigmatize, Destigmatize, Destigmatize.