Quality of life impact of mental health conditions in England: results from the adult psychiatric morbidity surveys

Background The main objective is to present health state utility estimates for a broad range of mental health conditions including anxiety, depression, long-term depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, phobia, panic disorder, psychosis, alcohol and drug dependency that can be used in economic models.

Methods This study uses pooled data from the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Surveys carried out in 2000 and 2007 of a representative sample of the general population in England. Health state utility values measured by the SF-6D and EQ-5D indices are the dependent variables. Independent variables include background characteristics, mental health and physical health conditions. Regression models were estimated using OLS for the SF-6D and tobit for EQ-5D. Further regressions were carried out to consider the impact of mental health and physical health morbidities and the impact of severity of conditions on utility values.

Results Mental health conditions tend to have a larger impact on health state utility values than physical health conditions. The mental health conditions associated with the highest decrements in utility are: depression, mixed anxiety and depressive disorders and long-term depression. Interaction terms used to model the effect of co-morbidities are generally found to be positive implying that simply adding the utility decrements for two mental health conditions overestimates the burden of the disease.

Conclusions This paper presents reliable and representative community based mean SF-6D and EQ-5D estimates with standard errors for health state utility values across a broad range of mental health conditions that can be used in cost effectiveness modelling.