Depressive disorder cases among Colombians under 30 years old tripled between 2015 and 2024, suicide attempt cases in the working-age population multiplied 18 times over the same decade, and the total direct cost of mental health disorders in Colombia reached US$13.8 billion in 2024, equivalent to 3.3% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP,) according to figures compiled by the Consejo Colombiano de Seguridad (CCS) and released around the World Day for Safety and Health at Work on April 28, 2026.
The cost of not treating mental health disorders at scale is no longer an abstraction for Colombia’s labor market: in 2024, more than 83,000 people aged 15 to 64 received care for depressive episodes, double the figure from a decade earlier, and only 49.2% of those who needed mental health attention during the year actually received it, leaving more than half of the affected working-age population without effective treatment and absorbing the consequences in lost productivity, medical costs, and human damage.
A generation entering the workforce already under pressure
The concentration of cases among young Colombians carries the heaviest long-term weight: in 2024, youth between 15 and 19 years of age accounted for 16.7% of all mental health consultations for depression, and depressive disorder care records for the population under 30 tripled compared to 2015, a rate of growth that Adriana Solano Luque, president of the CCS, described as directly relevant to the labor market because “this group represents the entry point to working life or higher education and, in this sense, the workforce that will enter the job market in the short and medium term could be arriving with a significant mental health burden.”
Women carried 70% of the depression care load in 2024, a disparity that compounds across the workforce data: in the 6,569 work-related mental health cases Colombia registered during that year, women again represented 62.6% of those treated, while adults between 30 and 44 accounted for 43.2% of work-related care, with the 40-to-44 age group posting the highest rate at 26.22 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, numbers that trace the cost of not treating early-stage mental health deterioration directly onto the most economically productive decades of a working life.
Those work-related figures grew 38.2% between 2023 and 2024 alone and nearly tripled against 2014 totals, a trajectory that Solano Luque attributed to specific workplace conditions: unemployment threats, informal contracts, extended hours, harassment, and excessive physical or mental workload, all operating simultaneously in a Colombian labor market where informality still covers more than half of employed workers and where the regulatory protections in Resolución 2646 de 2008 (Colombia’s occupational psychosocial risk standard, the country’s main legal tool for managing mental health in the workplace) have enforcement gaps that limit their practical reach.
Suicide data and a decade of compounding losses
The suicide attempt figures make the cost of not treating mental health at work its most urgent dimension: in 2024, Colombia recorded 30,818 suicide attempts in the working-age population, against 1,704 in 2014, an 18-fold increase that accumulated 222,000 attempts over the decade, with youth between 15 and 19 accounting for 30.9% of cases and women for 63.9%, while men between 20 and 24 represented 80.3% of the 24,230 deaths from intentional self-harm registered between 2015 and 2024, a 29.3% increase in fatalities against the prior decade.
Geographically, Bogotá led in absolute attempts with 4,980 cases, followed by Antioquia with 4,957 and Valle del Cauca with 2,565, while Vaupés posted the country’s highest rate at 364.93 per 100,000 inhabitants, a figure that reflects how the crisis reaches remote, resource-poor territories with the least mental health infrastructure and the highest distance from specialized care.
The productivity losses that run alongside those human costs exceeded US$4.46 billion over the last decade, more than double the equivalent figure for the period before 2022, and Colombia’s next government, which takes office in August 2026, will inherit a crisis where the 49.2% treatment coverage rate and the 18-fold increase in suicide attempts in a single decade leave no room for the compliance-checkbox approach that has characterized workplace mental health policy until now; the incoming administration either funds enforcement of Resolución 2646 de 2008 and expands mental health coverage, or absorbs the compounding economic and human cost of continuing to do neither.