I also plan to orient you to where mental health, mental disorders fit in with respect to interference with social occupation, of course. Looking at this with respect to DALYs, we see actually that, these are more recent figures. Up until about 10 years ago, mental disorders were actually leading with respect to the causes of DALYs. But now we see that it's actually ticked down to about 13.3 or 13.6 percent, and neurological disorders also accounting for another 5 percent, so depending on how we define those and group them in with mental disorders or psychiatric disorders. What does DALYs stand for? It stands for disability life years. This is actually disability adjusted life years. This is the quantified impact in terms of the extent to which people might be missing work, missing productivity time, basically. It's comprised of all these amounts of interference? Yes, it's the public health, it's one of the basic outcomes that we're talking about the influence of variety of diseases, and this is the way that it's very much in public health research present the impact both on the individual level and on the societal level. Mental health, one of the leading causes of disability in the United States. Now I also want to give you a little bit of an idea of how this works out across the lifespan. Here we see basically that during the most productive years with respect to occupation, so starting in young adulthood, and actually it begins at the end of the teenage years, that mental health or mental disorders are the leading cause of disability. That extends, you can see all the way up until the mid to late 70s when the majority of people have stopped working, are retired, that mental and behavioral disorders are the leading cause of disability. This is according to World Health Organization, so this is worldwide. This is the United States. I'm sorry about that. It's United States. The gap, the amount is tripling the other ones, right? Yeah, it's pretty tremendous, so a fact that we can see here. The main points I want to really come across in this introductory segment is that we're talking one in four will experience mental disorder annually, and that mental illness is the fourth leading cause of disability, but it's the primary cause of disability for younger adults. The key points. Mental disorders are developmental disorders, meaning that we see them entering at pretty predictable ages of onset. They do begin in childhood, but you see most mental disorders starting to emerge in late teens and early adulthood. We don't have a perfect understanding of what causes a mental disorder, but we know it's a complex interplay of some genetic predispositions or risk factors and environmental risk factors. We don't have a perfect idea of, there's an X factor plus a Y factor plus a Z factor. If we had a more perfect understanding, that would better elucidate for us places of intervention. But we're getting a lot better at understanding and figuring out how to not only treat, but also potentially intervene or reduce the risk of likelihood of a more severe mental illness emerging. We do have some very good treatments that we've been able to identify, and I'm going to go into these in greater detail in other videos segments. We know that treatment is necessary, but we don't have a treatment that works for all people all the time. But we have been able to identify as a field, a set of psychotherapies as well as medications that are effective and have great empirical support for helping people. We do know that over time, prevalence and mortality have not been reduced despite these advances in our understanding of the science. We don't necessarily have any cures and we don't have a powerful vaccine. But we are going to talk about ways that we have identified that we can potentially prevent the onset of mental disorders or at least optimize our mental health as much as possible. When we return, we'll get into some of those details.
