Treatment-Resistant Depression Costs Billions Annually

the Psychiatry Advisor take:

Depression that is resistant to standard forms of treatment costs up to $64 billion per year. That figure that represents nearly one-third of the annual cost for treating depression overall in the United States — $200 billion.

And although patients suffering from treatment-resistant depression (TRD) account for between 12% and 20% of all depression case, they exact a disproportionate amount of financial resources in their health care, John Hornberger, MD, CEO, and president of Cedar Associates, a health research organization in Menlo Park, California, and colleagues wrote in Psychiatric Services in Advance.

Patients with TRD have a higher rate of fatigue, anxiety, suicidal thoughts and lower quality of life compared to those patients who saw improvement in their symptoms, according to Psychiatric News. As a result, people with TRD see their physicians more, use more medication and miss more work — all factors that lead to tremendous direct and indirect costs.

On average, the annual direct (health care) and indirect (productivity) costs for an individual with treatment-resistant depression were nearly double those of someone with treatment-responsive depression and nearly quadruple the annual health care costs for the general population ($20,120 vs. $10,592 vs. $5,095).

Societal costs may be even higher, the researchers noted, given that the impact of depression on friends and family was not considered in the study.