Interesting to see that you didn’t use IHME’s DALY weights for mild, moderate and severe depression, which are derived from surveys of ordinary people making pairwise comparisons (GBD, 2019).
In my report on mental health interventions (coming soon!) I took data from Pyne et al. (2009) which asked sufferers, ex-sufferers and never-sufferers of depression to rate the badness of different levels of depression. My analysis of the data suggests that sufferers rate depression to be approximately 20% worse than a typical person would. Interestingly, this phenomenon of rating your own condition worse than others would does not seem to hold for most health conditions (see Pyne et al., 2009).
I also tried to model the DALY burden that comes from the additional suicide risk associated with depression, and reached an estimate of 0.066 DALYs for each year of depression. This is contingent on some dodgy data on the effect of depression on suicide rates, and ought to vary a lot by gender and nationality.
Putting it all together, I got an estimated weighting of 0.392 for an average case of depression. My central estimate is 0.145 DALYs per SD of depression symptoms, so about 22% lower than yours.
Thanks very much for the comment, this is really interesting. The idea of explicitly adding in suicide risk is an interesting direction for the analysis, it sounds like good work. When you publish your paper, I’ll be interested to consider whether the underlying estimates of the badness of depression (perhaps implicitly) already reflect the suicide angle.
At some point it might be useful to do a more careful compare and contrast between your method (using Pyne et al’s paper) and our method (using the Sanderson paper). Given that the methods are quite different, if anything, I think it’s actually quite striking that the methods ended up with numbers that are actually fairly similar (0.145 DALYs per SD-year vs 0.18 DALYs per SD-year).
So glad you’re looking into this.
Interesting to see that you didn’t use IHME’s DALY weights for mild, moderate and severe depression, which are derived from surveys of ordinary people making pairwise comparisons (GBD, 2019).
[Figure from WHO (2020).]
In my report on mental health interventions (
coming soon!) I took data from Pyne et al. (2009) which asked sufferers, ex-sufferers and never-sufferers of depression to rate the badness of different levels of depression. My analysis of the data suggests that sufferers rate depression to be approximately 20% worse than a typical person would. Interestingly, this phenomenon of rating your own condition worse than others would does not seem to hold for most health conditions (see Pyne et al., 2009).I also tried to model the DALY burden that comes from the additional suicide risk associated with depression, and reached an estimate of 0.066 DALYs for each year of depression. This is contingent on some dodgy data on the effect of depression on suicide rates, and ought to vary a lot by gender and nationality.
Putting it all together, I got an estimated weighting of 0.392 for an average case of depression. My central estimate is 0.145 DALYs per SD of depression symptoms, so about 22% lower than yours.
Thanks very much for the comment, this is really interesting. The idea of explicitly adding in suicide risk is an interesting direction for the analysis, it sounds like good work. When you publish your paper, I’ll be interested to consider whether the underlying estimates of the badness of depression (perhaps implicitly) already reflect the suicide angle.
At some point it might be useful to do a more careful compare and contrast between your method (using Pyne et al’s paper) and our method (using the Sanderson paper). Given that the methods are quite different, if anything, I think it’s actually quite striking that the methods ended up with numbers that are actually fairly similar (0.145 DALYs per SD-year vs 0.18 DALYs per SD-year).
The report is now public: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/ykdScawzq59ntw9N3