The World Health Organization, on 2 September 2025, released new data showing that more than 1 billion people globally are currently living with mental health conditions, including anxiety and depression. These conditions are now the second-leading cause of long-term disability worldwide, impose heavy direct health-cost burdens on individuals and families, and, significantly, drive indirect losses through reduced productivity across societies.
The reports underpinning this release, World Mental Health Today and Mental Health Atlas 2024, reveal large and persistent gaps in global response. Median health-budget spending on mental health remains just around 2%, unchanged since 2017; workforce capacity remains extremely thin, and fewer than 10% of countries have fully transitioned to community-based models of care. The WHO is urging urgent scaled-up investment, rights-based policy reform, and expanded access to person-centred, community-based services, framing mental-health care not as a privilege but as a basic human right.
