Economic evaluation of mental health promotion and mental illness prevention

Abstract

Economic evaluation is a conglomerate of methods that aim to make explicit the costs and consequences of competing healthcare programmes, and the interconnections between them, so that different interventions can be compared in terms of their value-for-money. In this chapter we outline the main building blocks of health economic evaluation, we explain the differences between the prevailing techniques and we discuss their application in the context of mental health promotion and mental illness prevention.