Rabat – Approximately 1,484,441 Moroccan individuals, representing nearly 4.5% of the Moroccan population, live with depression. A further 1,477,408, also 4.5% of the population, suffer from anxiety, according to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) report for 2015.
Calculating the combined numbers of years depressed individuals lived with their disorder, the WHO’s report found that Years Lived with Disability (YLD) in Morocco amounted to 265,318, or 7.4 % of total depression cases. As for anxiety sufferers, the YLD figure was 135,833, or 3.8% of Morocco’s total number of anxiety cases.
The report, titled Depression and Other Common Mental Disorders – Global Health Estimates, was released last week by the WHO. It illustrates that depression and anxiety cases in Morocco are ranked second in North Africa, after Tunisia. That country is reported to have 4.9% of its population suffering from depression, and 4.6% suffering from anxiety.
Globally, the number of people living with depression, which is 1.5 times more common among women than men, was estimated to have exceeded 300 million. Worldwide anxiety cases were approximately 264 million.
Compared to the WHO’s 2005 report, the number of depression cases increased by 18.4%. Anxiety cases increased by 14.9% during the 10-year period.
Dan Chisholm, author of the WHO study, told reporters in Geneva that the consequences of these disorders in terms of the loss of mental and physical health, are substantial.
“If you look at the prevalence of different disorders around the world and you look at the disability that is associated with them, if you combine those together, depression ends up at the top of the list because it is very common,” explained Chisholm.
“You can see one in 20 people in the world have it and then it has quite a high level of impairment or disability associated with it,” he added.
