Mental Health Awareness Month: Fighting the growing mental health crisis and supporting innovation – PHRMA
By Andrew Powaleny
America is currently facing a mental health crisis — one that is impacting families and individuals in every community, with the COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbating these trends. Mental Health Awareness Month, which is held each year in May, presents an opportunity to discuss ways to address the growing burden of, and stigma surrounding, mental illness.
What you should know:
More than one in 20 Americans have a serious mental illness, which reduces average life expectancy by 10 years. Major depressive disorder is the second leading cause of disability in the United States. Despite the growing prevalence and burden of mental illness, there remains a significant, unmet medical need for treatment options. For instance, a staggering 33% of patients with major depressive disorder have treatment-resistant forms of the illness. The same is true for those with schizophrenia.
Unfortunately, developing medicines to treat mental illness has some of the lowest probabilities of success. This is due in large part to the inherent scientific challenges and complexities that come with developing medicines to treat these illnesses, including a limited understanding of the brain and the neurochemical pathways involved in these illnesses. Though the field of neuroscience has made advancements in recent years, there remains a significant gap in the larger understanding of how mental illnesses develop in the first place. This, combined with the extremely diverse nature of the diseases themselves — which often manifest differently in different people — have made it difficult to identify biomarkers that can aid in diagnosis, treatment and the development of medicines to treat these illnesses.