But people can develop a mental health issue at any stage of their life, or experience recurring episodes over their lifetime.<\/p>\n
These statistics don\u2019t tell us anything about what share of people will ever experience a mental health problem. That\u2019s the question I want to answer in this article.<\/p>\n
To do this, I\u2019ll use data from a 2023 study by John McGrath and colleagues, which drew on data from 29 countries to model what share of people develop mental disorders over their lives.1<\/a><\/p>\n This data came from World Mental Health Surveys, conducted between 2001 and 2022. In these surveys, more than 150,000 people are asked in face-to-face interviews about their history of specific mental health disorders. These are structured diagnostic interviews, and from there, researchers can understand the prevalence of these disorders and when they tend to begin in someone\u2019s life.<\/p>\n As these interviews include people at very different stages in their lives, they can help build up a model of how the cumulative risk of a mental illness develops with age. For example, what share of people have experienced depression by the age of 15, 30, or 50?<\/p>\n For many, their first experience is young \u2014 in childhood, adolescence, or early adulthood. In a previous article<\/a>, I looked at the age at which people tend to develop mental health issues for the first time.<\/p>\n In the chart below, you can see these cumulative risk curves for men and women across four mental health disorders: depression, anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, and alcohol dependence and abuse. Age is shown on the horizontal axis, and the cumulative risk on the vertical axis.<\/p>\n Aside: Alcohol dependence has stricter criteria than alcohol abuse, and includes addiction-like behaviors that are not necessarily present in those who abuse alcohol. In the first panel, for example, you can see that by the age of 75, one in three women has experienced depression at some point in their lives. One in five men has.<\/p>\n By age 30, it\u2019s only around half as many, which tells us that roughly half of those who will ever experience depression have their first episode before 30, and half after.<\/p>\n From this chart, you can also see clear sex differences. Depression and anxiety are more common in women than in men, but alcohol dependence and abuse are the opposite. Men and women are equally likely to experience bipolar disorder.<\/p>\n Subscribe<\/a><\/p>\n With these cumulative risk curves, we can return to our original question: what share of people will develop a particular mental health disorder in their lifetime?<\/p>\n The chart below answers this question, showing the share of men and women who will experience different mental health disorders by the age of 75.<\/p>\n Anxiety disorders encapsulate a range of conditions, including generalized anxiety, phobias, panic disorder, social anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Almost one in three women and nearly one in five men will experience at least one of these in their lifetime.<\/p>\n Mood disorders include both depression and bipolar disorder. More than one in three women and one in four men will experience at least one of these. The sex gap here is explained by differences in rates of depression, rather than bipolar disorder.<\/p>\n Depression and anxiety are more common in women than in men, but alcohol dependence and abuse are the opposite.<\/p>\n Finally, we see that substance use disorders \u2014 whether that\u2019s alcohol or other drugs \u2014 are the opposite. They\u2019re more common among men. Alcohol or drug abuse has a much less stringent definition, so its rates are far higher than dependence on a particular substance.<\/p>\n People can often experience multiple mental health disorders in their lifetime. It\u2019s fairly common that someone with depression also experiences anxiety, or that someone with an addiction to alcohol has a history of depression or PTSD. So, to estimate the share of people who will experience any mental health disorder in their lifetime, we can\u2019t just add all of these shares together.<\/p>\n The authors do provide a separate estimate, though, and conclude that around half of people can expect to develop at least one of the mental health disorders studied in this article by the time they\u2019re 75.2<\/a><\/p>\n Additional informationWhy these estimates of lifetime risk might be conservative<\/p>\n The main takeaway from this article is that mental health issues are incredibly common. Around half will develop at least one of these disorders by the age of 75. Even for specific issues, such as depression or anxiety, one in three women will experience it at some stage.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s reason to expect that these figures are actually conservative, and the true lifetime risk could be even higher.<\/p>\n This is because these studies rely on people recalling previous mental health episodes. Most people can do this reasonably well, particularly in structured diagnostic interviews. But in older generations, in particular, recall can be an issue.<\/p>\n My colleague Saloni Dattani wrote about this<\/a> in detail for the lifetime risk of depression. She presents the headline result that around one in three women and one in five men in the United States experience depression by the age of 65. But she also highlights various studies in other high-income countries that find even higher figures, particularly when they attempt to adjust for this \u201crecall bias\u201d.<\/p>\n John McGrath and colleagues \u2014 the authors of the meta-analysis used in this article \u2014 also flag this as a limitation in our understanding of lifetime risk.<\/p>\n It therefore seems fair to frame these results as conservative. The true share could be higher.<\/p>\n Acknowledgments<\/p>\n Many thanks to Edouard Mathieu for feedback and comments on this article.<\/p>\n Continue reading on Our World in DataCite this work<\/p>\n Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this article, please also cite the underlying data sources. This article can be cited as:<\/p>\n Hannah Ritchie (2026) – \u201cAround half of people will experience a mental health issue in their lifetime\u201d Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https:\/\/archive.ourworldindata.org\/20261102-000111\/around-half-of-people-will-experience-a-mental-health-issue-in-their-lifetime.html’ [Online Resource] (archived on November 2, 2026).<\/p>\n BibTeX citation<\/p>\n @article{owid-around-half-of-people-will-experience-a-mental-health-issue-in-their-lifetime, We are a live site and we keep our work maintained. So our articles are often changed, including the data. 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\n author = {Hannah Ritchie},
\n title = {Around half of people will experience a mental health issue in their lifetime},
\n journal = {Our World in Data},
\n year = {2026},
\n note = {https:\/\/archive.ourworldindata.org\/20261102-000111\/around-half-of-people-will-experience-a-mental-health-issue-in-their-lifetime.html}
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