Understanding mental health interventions—We’d like to understand if we can rely on $/DALY or $/QALY metrics to capture mental health benefits or, if not, if there is a better cost-effectiveness metric that better captures mental health benefits. Once we have a good framework for prioritizing mental health, we’d like to see if we can identify any mental health opportunities that are competitive with other EA opportunities.
Recommend chatting with Natalia Mendoça about this. She’s done a lot of good, independent work on these questions.
Summary of a recent presentation she gave:
Natalia Mendoça presented about “Using smartphones to improve well-being measures in order to aid cause prioritization research” (link to presentation). She argued that the experience sampling paradigms that made waves in the 2000s and early 2010s happened at a time when relatively few people had smartphones. Since today smartphone adoption in developing countries has exploded we could use an experience sampling app to determine the major causes of suffering throughout the world in a way that wasn’t possible before. She specifically mentioned “comparing how bad different illnesses feel” in order to help us guide policy decision for cause prioritization.
tl;dr experience sampling seems methodologically superior to QALY surveying, and could be done at large scale cheaply given the massive growth of smartphone use over the last decade.
One of the takeaways was that mental health appears as a much bigger problem under the experience-sampling framework than it does under the QALY framework.
e.g. QALY framework considers one year with “some problems walking about” to be about as bad as one year with “moderate anxiety or depression.”
Recommend chatting with Natalia Mendoça about this. She’s done a lot of good, independent work on these questions.
Summary of a recent presentation she gave:
tl;dr experience sampling seems methodologically superior to QALY surveying, and could be done at large scale cheaply given the massive growth of smartphone use over the last decade.
One of the takeaways was that mental health appears as a much bigger problem under the experience-sampling framework than it does under the QALY framework.
e.g. QALY framework considers one year with “some problems walking about” to be about as bad as one year with “moderate anxiety or depression.”
Which seems obviously wrong.
Here’s the presentation deck.