IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/nierev/v202y2007ip90-98_10.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Cost-benefit analysis of psychological therapy

Author

Listed:
  • Layard, R.
  • Clark, D.
  • Knapp, M.
  • Mayraz, G.

Abstract

At present six million people are suffering from clinical depression or anxiety disorders, but only a quarter of them are in treatment. NICE Guidelines prescribe the offer of evidence-based psychological therapy, but they are not implemented, due to lack of therapists within the NHS. We therefore estimate the economic costs and benefits of providing psychological therapy to people not now in treatment. The cost to the governement would be fully covered by the savings in incapacity benefits and extra taxes that result from more people being able to work. On our estimates, the cost could be recovered within two years - and certainly within five. And the benefits to the whole economy are greater still. This is not because we expect the extra therapy to be targeted especially at people with problems about work. It is because the cost of the therapy is so small (£750 in total), the recovery rates are so high (50 per cent) and the cost of a person on IB is so large (£750 per month). These findings strongly reinforce the humanitatian case for implementing the NICE Guidelines. Current proposals for doing this would require some 8,000 extra psychological therapists withing the NHS over the six years.

Suggested Citation

  • Layard, R. & Clark, D. & Knapp, M. & Mayraz, G., 2007. "Cost-benefit analysis of psychological therapy," National Institute Economic Review, National Institute of Economic and Social Research, vol. 202, pages 90-98, October.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:nierev:v:202:y:2007:i::p:90-98_10
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0027950100012631/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Layard, Richard & Chisholm, Dan & Patel, Vikram & Saxena, Shekhar, 2013. "Mental Illness and Unhappiness," IZA Discussion Papers 7620, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Leire Alcaniz & Ana Martínez-Pampliega & Marta Herrero, 2022. "Cost-Benefit Analysis of an Intervention in Divorced Parents: Implications for Society, Public Administrations and Family Visitation Centers," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 19(6), pages 1-11, March.
    3. Patricio V. Marquez, 2016. "Mental Health Among Displaced People and Refugees," World Bank Publications - Reports 25854, The World Bank Group.
    4. Ralph Chapman & Nicholas Preval & Philippa Howden-Chapman, 2017. "How Economic Analysis Can Contribute to Understanding the Links between Housing and Health," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 14(9), pages 1-12, August.
    5. Gruber, Jonathan & Lordan, Grace & Pilling, Stephen & Propper, Carol & Saunders, Rob, 2022. "The impact of mental health support for the chronically ill on hospital utilisation: Evidence from the UK," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 294(C).
    6. Tim Bothe & Josephine Jacob & Christoph Kröger & Jochen Walker, 2020. "How expensive are post-traumatic stress disorders? Estimating incremental health care and economic costs on anonymised claims data," The European Journal of Health Economics, Springer;Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ), vol. 21(6), pages 917-930, August.
    7. Layard, Richard & Chisholm, Dan & Patel, Vikram & Saxena, Shekhar, 2013. "Mental illness and unhappiness," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 121783, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    8. Benjamin Ly Serena, 2021. "Revisiting Offsets of Psychotherapy Coverage," CEBI working paper series 21-05, University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. The Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality (CEBI).
    9. Böckerman, Petri & Johansson, Edvard & Saarni, Samuli I., 2011. "Do established health-related quality-of-life measures adequately capture the impact of chronic conditions on subjective well-being?," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 100(1), pages 91-95, April.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:nierev:v:202:y:2007:i::p:90-98_10. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/niesruk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.