People with severe mental illness twice as likely to die early in Manchester than anywhere else

People with severe mental illness are more likely to die prematurely in Manchester than anywhere else in the country.

For every 100,000 people with severe mental illness, there were 233 deaths in Manchester. That means people with longstanding mental health conditions were more than twice as likely to die prematurely than the national average.

More than 130,000 adults with a severe mental illness (SMI) – the term for debilitating psychological problems that often leave sufferers struggling to carry out daily tasks or work – died prematurely in England between 2021 and 2023.

That’s around 18,000 more deaths than in the three-year period from 2017 to 2019, just before the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that followed, leaving many people isolated and cut off from essential support. During that time, the rate of premature deaths in England increased from 98 deaths for every 100,000 people with SMI in 2017-19 to 111 deaths.

The NHS in Greater Manchester said: "We will look closely at the latest set of data release to better understand if there was anything that could have been done differently which we will then feed into our current programmes of work."

Outcomes for people with severe mental illness are far worse in some parts of the country than others. From 2021 to 2023, more people with an SMI died prematurely in Kent than in any other county council area in England, a total of 3,700.

But when compared to the size of the severe mental illness population in each area, premature deaths are far more likely in Manchester, at 232 for every 100,000 people with severe mental illness.

Next was Blackpool (232 deaths per 100,000), and then Middlesbrough (213), Stoke-on-Trent (199), Kingston upon Hull (198), and Liverpool