A press release crossed our alerts this week announcing that the “digital therapeutics market” will hit $39.52 billion by 2033. It showed up because it mentioned mental illness. So we went and read the actual report behind it. Here’s what we found: diabetes management gets a full breakout — 35.3% market share, named as the category leader, backed by a real number (589 million people affected globally). Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and serious mental illness get one clause. Not a paragraph. Not a percentage. A single phrase, lumped in with “chronic diseases… neurological disorders, addiction recovery, and rehabilitation,” as if naming the category were the same as counting it.
It isn’t. And the omission isn’t neutral.
When a market research firm builds a report and gives diabetes its own line item with its own number, that’s a signal to every investor, founder, and health system reading it: this is where the money and the products are going. When the same report can’t be bothered to give schizophrenia or bipolar disorder so much as a market-share estimate, that’s a signal too — just the opposite one. It tells the entire digital health industry that serious mental illness isn’t a category worth measuring, which becomes a self-fulfilling reason not to build for it, fund it, or track it. You cannot correct a gap you’ve refused to count.
And this report isn’t even new information circulating once. The identical $39.52 billion figure, the identical 21.6% CAGR, has been repackaged into at least seven separate press releases on openPR.com alone over the past several months, each with a slightly reworded headline, each recirculating through search and alert systems as if it were fresh news. Diabetes gets counted with precision and then that precision gets multiplied seven times over through syndication. Serious mental illness gets a throwaway clause, and that clause gets copy-pasted seven times right along with it — meaning the erasure isn’t a one-time oversight. It’s being distributed at scale, repeatedly, without anyone editing it in.
I’m not arguing digital tools for diabetes don’t deserve investment — they do, and 589 million people is a real number worth taking seriously. I’m arguing that the millions of families managing schizophrenia and bipolar disorder deserve to be more than an afterthought clause in a report that found room for a full paragraph on blood glucose monitoring. If an industry can’t be bothered to count us, it isn’t going to build for us either. That’s not a data gap. That’s a choice, made quietly, seven times over, by people who will never have to explain it to a family in crisis.
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