Climate variability, poverty and substance use disorders: Exploring maladaptive coping mechanisms in climate-stressed communities of Northwest Nigeria.

We systematically searched PubMed for articles published in English from database inception to December 1, 2025, using the search terms including “mental disorders”, “depressive disorders”, “anxiety disorders”, “schizophrenia”, “autism spectrum disorders”, “bipolar disorder”, “conduct disorder”, “eating disorders”, “attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder”, “idiopathic developmental intellectual disability”, “other mental disorders”, “mental health”, “mental disease”, “China”, “global burden of disease”, “GBD”. Previous research has predominantly focused on specific population subsets, limited disease categories, or exclusively on national level estimates, utilizing superseded Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) iterations. For instance, recent analyses utilizing GBD 2021 data were restricted either to children and adolescents or exclusively to depressive and anxiety disorders. Other studies assessing the broader trends of mental disorders in China were confined strictly to health loss metrics or limited to national-level aggregated data. To date, no study has comprehensively assessed the burden of all ten mental disorder subtypes across all age groups, encompassing both prevalence and health loss at both the national and subnational levels in China using the latest GBD 2023 iteration. To our knowledge, this is the most up-to-date and comprehensive assessment of the burden of mental disorders in China and its provinces from 1990 to 2023, based on the latest estimates from GBD 2023. Our findings indicated that China has witnessed a substantial escalation in the burden of mental disorders over the past three decades. Beneath the aggregate trends, depressive and anxiety disorders remained the dominant contributors, while eating disorders exhibited the largest increase. Regarding sex disparities, females experienced a higher prevalence of depressive disorders, whereas males bore a heavier burden of neurodevelopmental and behavioral conditions, including autism spectrum disorders, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and conduct disorder. Across the lifespan, the burden of disability-adjusted life years was relatively higher in the 5–19, 30–39, and 50–59 age groups. At the subnational level, we revealed substantial spatial variations. Both hyper-urbanized regions like Hong Kong and Macao and relatively less developed western provinces exhibited high burdens, contrasting with the comparatively lower estimates reported in mainland megacities; however, these geographical patterns should be interpreted with caution given potential differences in data availability and reporting practices.