The illness of individuals was linked to the welfare of society through the cost-of-illness studies inaugurated by health economists in the mid-1960s, most notably, by Dorothy Rice. To the social burden of illness was added the social origins of disease by epidemiologists, marked by John Cassel’s classic in 1976 on the social environment as a factor in host resistance. These frameworks made policy shifts possible in human health, but as implied in the new Institute of Medicine report, Rebuilding the Unity of Health and the Environment, they left one question unasked: how good can human health be without the nonhuman? Ecological scientists have switched from counting species and pollutants to counting how many species have disappeared and the loss of resistance in ecosystems. Yet the translation of natural loss to human loss has been slow, confined to the terms of illness and toxicity, rather than how human health is filtered through ecological systems. Failures in HIV/AIDS prevention have allowed some opening in relation to the built environment, as interventionists have shifted from an exclusive focus on individual risk factors to neighborhood effects and the urban context of cognitive and affective functioning. This presentation proposes a framework for a further opening, including a response to the problems posed in the IOM report. Just as with the cost-of-illness approach that linked individual and social welfare, this framework links nonhuman and human welfare by translating the bionomics of ecosystems into a new economics for human systems, with an application to mental health.
Learning Objectives: Participants will gain an unforgettable framework for connecting ecosystem health and human health that will be relevant to linking human, social, and natural capital in mental health, with the aim of more effectively analyzing the new policy culture of global health.
Keywords: Environment, Mental Health
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Organization/institution whose products or services will be discussed: None
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.