© Worldwide Magazine
'Mental health disorders are Europe's largest healthcare challenge in the twenty-first century', announced Hans-Ulrich Wittchen this week.
A professor of psychology and psychotherapy at the University of Dresden, Wittchen wasn't saying anything we haven't heard before. The World Health Organisation has also gleefully predicted that by 2020, 'depression will be the second leading contributor to the burden of disease'. Still, the magnitude of Wittchen's Europe-wide diagnosis is more than a little shocking: 38 per cent of Europeans, he said, are suffering from a mental disorder. That's about 165million people.
Wittchen arrived at these shocking results, published in Neuropsychopharmacology, after a three-year-long review of data from previous studies involving over 500million people in 30 European countries. Therein he discovered that nearly 40 per cent of those 500million were suffering from one of nearly a hundred mental or neurological problems, the most common of which were anxiety disorders, insomnia, depression, alcohol and drug dependence, and dementia.
