Abstract
The current economic crisis poses severe challenges for the provision of mental health services around the world. At the very time when a severe recession increases many people's need for mental health services, public programs face declining revenues to fund those services. We review evidence of how past recessions affected public funding for mental health treatment as well as the preliminary evidence regarding the current recession's impact. Interestingly, although many countries are cutting spending as anticipated, a few of the wealthier countries are actually allocating funding to deal with the anticipated increase in mental health problems. More systematic tracking of mental health spending worldwide will be important in the future to identify problem areas and good ideas for responding to recessions.