Talking therapy: Impacts of a nationwide mental health service in England

Ekaterina Oparina, Christian Krekel and Sorawoot Srisuma

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: Common mental health problems impose significant costs on individuals and societies, yet healthcare systems often overlook them. We provide the first causal evidence on the effectiveness of a pioneering, nationwide mental health service for treating depression and anxiety disorders in England using non-experimental data and methods. We exploit variations in waiting times to identify treatment effects, based on a novel dataset of over one million patients that well represent the English population. Our findings show that treatment improved mental health and reduced impairment in work and social life. We also provide suggestive evidence of enhanced employment. However, effects vary across patients, services, and areas. The programme is cost-effective and provides a blueprint for treating mental health in other countries.

Keywords: policy evaluation; mental health; psychological therapies; quasi-natural experiment; machine learning; cost-benefit analysis; Wellbeing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-02-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1982.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Talking Therapy: Impacts of a Nationwide Mental Health Service in England (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1982

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().