Mental Disorders and Treatment

Individual clinical services are not a good way to meet a population's mental health needs, as is becoming increasingly evident in the fields of public health and research on mental health services. There has been a lot of interest in population-based approaches to mental health care, but little is known about what they are and no evidence of their effectiveness has been incorporated. Using research and scholarship from a variety of fields, this review provides a precise definition of population-based approaches to mental health, places these approaches in their historical context in the United States, and summarizes the nature of these approaches and their evidence. These techniques cover three areas: a) the social, economic, and environmental policy interventions that legislators and public agency directors are able to implement; b) public health practice interventions that can be implemented by public health department employees; and c) health care system interventions that can be carried out by hospital and system leaders.