Valuing Depression Using the Well-Being Valuation Approach

The continuously dramatic increase of the number of people suffering from depression attracts an increasing demand for effective ways of preventing depression. Without the need for new interventions, there is also a continuous call for a more robust framework for economic evaluation of public interventions. Taking in account people’s preferences for public goods is not straightforward to quantify, and therefore, without the importance of designing new technique for valuing nonmarket goods and services, it is equally important to use methods that are not yet established as traditional. One less used method to assess the cost of depression in monetary terms is the well-being valuation method or the life satisfaction approach, which requires answers to questions that are significantly less time demanding for the respondents than more traditional approaches to valuation. We use, to our knowledge, for the first time Swedish data to value the individual experience of depression in monetary terms by using the well-being valuation method; i.e., we estimate how much money would be needed to compensate people to return their well-being level without having depression. In order to do this, we asked well-being questions to 500 respondents that were randomly selected from a Swedish representative web-panel during the fall 2017 and answered a web-contingent valuation survey that includes a detailed description of an intervention aimed to decrease depression and the hypothetical change regarding the intervention, questions about willingness to pay for the intervention and questions about respondents’ characteristics. Next to using a fairly new valuation method to value the experience of depression, our empirical analysis is also innovative on that it distinguishes between two types of situations, depending on whether the respondents themselves or someone that they knew well has experienced depression and also considered if the respondents were worried for becoming depressed. The estimated "well-being" cost of the respondents ...