Mental health disorders affect people worldwide and have become a major public health concern. Anxiety, depression, and substance use disorders are now among the most common illnesses. Although more people are seeking help, experts still don’t fully understand why these numbers keep rising.
A recent study in Psychological Medicine looked at whether common mental disorders are lasting longer for Dutch adults. The researchers compared two large groups of adults, studied 12 years apart. They found that these mental health conditions now last much longer than before.
Over the past decade, the number of people still dealing with anxiety, mood, or substance use disorders after three years went up from 42.7 percent to 57.9 percent. In the most recent survey, 55.2 percent of adults who started with a mental disorder still had one three years later.
In about a decade, mental health problems became much more common among Dutch adults. The percentage of adults with an anxiety disorder in a given year rose from 10.1 percent to 15.6 percent between the two survey periods.
During the same period, the percentage of people with a mood disorder went up from 6.0 percent to 10.8 percent. Substance use disorders also increased from 5.5 percent to 7.1 percent. These increases could not be explained by changes in age, income, or where people live.
The authors saw two possible reasons for these results. Either more people are developing mental health problems for the first time, or people who already have them are taking longer to get better. Understanding how long these illnesses last can help improve mental health care.
To learn more, researchers randomly chose Dutch adults from national and local records. They used data from the Netherlands Mental Health Survey and Incidence Study, which followed two separate groups starting in 2007 and 2019.
Researchers checked in with participants at the beginning of each study and again three years later. They found that the number of people who stayed in the same anxiety disorder category went up from 24 percent to 40 percent.
For mood disorders, the number of people who still had the same diagnosis after three years rose from 34 percent to 49 percent. Substance use disorders showed similar increases. The overall number of people with any common mental disorder after three years also went up by more than 15 percentage points.
These results suggest that mental health care should extend beyond the initial diagnosis. Services could monitor people’s conditions over time and make long-term care a standard part of treatment, alongside prevention and short-term support.
