Examining the Long-Term Economic Returns from Investments in Mental Health Interventions Within Corporate and Public Sectors

Abstract

 Mental disorders have persistent effects on productivity, earnings, and social participation, and they impose costs that accumulate across life cycles and generations. Organizations and governments increasingly fund interventions that range from brief psychosocial programs to digitally enabled care pathways deployed at scale. This study synthesizes economic mechanisms and long-horizon valuation methods to examine the long-term returns from investments in mental health interventions spanning corporate and public sectors. The analysis integrates firm-level productivity, labor market dynamics, healthcare utilization, education and justice externalities, and intergenerational transmission channels into a unified perspective on durable value creation. A cross-sector lens clarifies how corporate investments primarily monetize private benefits through absenteeism and presenteeism reductions, retention gains, and occupational safety, while public investments realize broader fiscal and societal payoffs through tax bases, transfer offsets, and avoided downstream costs. To evaluate persistence, we embed transition dynamics of mental health states, depreciation of intervention effects, and capital deepening responses that jointly shape macroeconomic spillovers. We discuss estimation strategies, measurement risks, and heterogeneity by age, job task, and disorder severity, emphasizing generalizability and incentive compatibility. The results provide decision rules for portfolio design under uncertainty, guidance on contracting structures that align private and social returns, and sensitivity to discounting and equity goals. Strategic implications include the use of outcome-linked finance, demand-side reinforcement through procurement, and governance that internalizes spillovers. The paper offers implementable valuation heuristics and modelling templates that enable firms and governments to compare, prioritize, and sequence investments in mental health with transparent, long-run economic criteria.