As income inequality continues to soar in the United States, researchers are working to more comprehensively measure the relationship between capitalism and declining mental health – an effort that experts say could help policymakers develop more effective solutions to the widespread mental health struggles plaguing Americans.

Americans’ collective mental health has been worsening for years. In 2023, the White House said the nation faced “a mental health crisis,” with 40% of U.S. adults having experienced depression or anxiety in 2021. That year, Gallup estimated that 22% of Americans experienced depression or anxiety severe enough to disrupt daily activities for two weeks or longer. Roughly a third of adolescents in the U.S. have an anxiety disorder, and in 2023, nearly one in five U.S. teens experienced a major depressive episode.

In 2024, 43% of Americans said they feel more anxious than they did in 2023, according to the American Psychiatric Association’s annual mental health poll. Last year, 37% of Americans reported higher levels of anxiety compared to 32% in 2022. The latest data from the National Institutes of Health shows that 23% of the population, or approximately 57 million Americans, experiences some form of mental illness.

“We genuinely see that a huge proportion of the population is severely affected and suffering from mental health issues,” Aleh Tsyvinski, professor of economics at Yale University, told Salon. “If this is not a macroeconomic crisis, then it's hard for me to think about what else may be a macroeconomic crisis.”

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Tsyvinski, alongside researchers Boaz Abramson and Job Boerma, recently published a “first-of-its-kind” study and model that measures the economic impact of Americans’ mental health struggles. Published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research in April, the model indexes for three characteristics of mental illnesses – rumination, negative thinking and reinforced behaviors – and attempts to measure how those characteristics affect a person’s consumption, job choice, savings and portfolio choices.

“We don't have a quantitative, macroeconomic framework to study mental illness,” Abramson told Salon. “And that is a necessary thing if you want to evaluate policies that try to improve mental health.”

Measured as economic output, the study estimates that Americans’ mental health struggles collectively cost the U.S. economy $282 billion every year – the economic loss of the average recession.

The NBER study is currently a “working paper;” meaning it hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Over the next few months, the coauthors will........

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