Abstract Disasters’ adverse impacts on human health are not limited to physical health but extend to mental health and well-being. Multiple causal mechanisms can impact mental health, including direct physical injury and disability, psychological trauma, the loss of loved ones, displacement, or socioeconomic stressors associated with the disaster recovery process. Here, we review the literature that focuses on the economic quantifications of the mental health consequences of disasters, including both how economic circumstances can contribute to or ameliorate the mental health impacts, and how these mental health impacts can shape people’s economic trajectories. We review several methods that can be used to quantify these costs. This literature also includes several cost-effectiveness studies of interventions that have been evaluated with quality-adjusted life years (QALY) metrics. We evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and describe their quantifications. Since these quantifications conclude that these mental health costs can be high, their exclusion from standard disaster risk assessments can lead to the underestimation of disasters’ total social costs, and consequently to an underinvestment in disaster risk-reduction measures. Quantifying these mental health costs may hence yield a more comprehensive understanding of disaster losses and help inform decisions about the appropriate levels of investments in prevention and mitigation.
Noy et al. (Thu,) studied this question.