Thanks for raising this—comparing things is a cause very close to my heart!
First, the report wasn’t trying to compare the importance of mental health as a cause area to other things, so I understand that you didn’t find that, because it wasn’t central.
Second, the report (p8) does compare the impact of depression and anxiety to various other health conditions, as well as to debt, unemployment, and divorce in terms of 0-10 life satisfaction, a measure of subjective well-being (SWB) - the other main measure of SWB is happiness. We, as in HLI, are pretty enthusiastic about comparing different outcomes in terms of SWB rather than anything else, e.g. QALYs. The obvious issue, if you use QALYs, is it’s a measure of health, and even if you thought it was an excellent measure of the impact of health on well-being, you still need to compare health to non-health outcomes.
Third, the report also mentions (p26) that I’ve previously done a fairly basic analysis, including in my PhD, using SWB to compare a mental health charity (StrongMind) to those recommended by GiveWell—on that mental health looks rather promising. Further, it notes (at p36) that HLI is now working on a more empirically sophisticated SWB analysis of the same type. We have some provisional results for this latter analysis and should be putting out those reports within a couple of months, and which point you are welcome to dive into that comparison!
Thanks for raising this—comparing things is a cause very close to my heart!
First, the report wasn’t trying to compare the importance of mental health as a cause area to other things, so I understand that you didn’t find that, because it wasn’t central.
Second, the report (p8) does compare the impact of depression and anxiety to various other health conditions, as well as to debt, unemployment, and divorce in terms of 0-10 life satisfaction, a measure of subjective well-being (SWB) - the other main measure of SWB is happiness. We, as in HLI, are pretty enthusiastic about comparing different outcomes in terms of SWB rather than anything else, e.g. QALYs. The obvious issue, if you use QALYs, is it’s a measure of health, and even if you thought it was an excellent measure of the impact of health on well-being, you still need to compare health to non-health outcomes.
We mentioned SWB in a recent post about Our 2020 Annual review, this post about using SWB to compare averting poverty to saving lives, I argue explicitly for in this 2018 post, and it’s raised in so many other places I’m starting to feel embarrassed about repeating myself, which is why it wasn’t featured prominently here(!)
Third, the report also mentions (p26) that I’ve previously done a fairly basic analysis, including in my PhD, using SWB to compare a mental health charity (StrongMind) to those recommended by GiveWell—on that mental health looks rather promising. Further, it notes (at p36) that HLI is now working on a more empirically sophisticated SWB analysis of the same type. We have some provisional results for this latter analysis and should be putting out those reports within a couple of months, and which point you are welcome to dive into that comparison!