The costs of schizophrenia. Assessing the burden.

Much has been learned about the costs of schizophrenia during the last three decades. Assessing the costs is a challenging task given the complexity of the disease. Much can be done to refine the methodologies of cost of schizophrenia studies based on the human capital approach and to develop the conceptual framework for a consistent account of the income distribution effects of the disease. The knowledge base, however, is quite extensive and data presented here indicate that although people with schizophrenia account only for about 1% of the adult population, they consume about 2.5% of total annual health care expenditures, they constitute about 10% of the totally and permanently disabled population, and comprise as high as about 14% of the homeless population in some large urban areas. These data clearly indicate the negative economic consequences of the disease: People with schizophrenia tend to be high users of medical care and tend to concentrate in subpopulations that are highly dependent on public assistance funds as a result of the disabling nature of the disease. These negative economic consequences of schizophrenia provide a powerful economic case for developing strategies to improve treatment effectiveness through biomedical and services research.