Historically, U.S. health insurance plans included fewer and more restrictive benefits for mental health (MH) and substance use disorder (SUD) treatment compared to general medical care. The 2008 Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA) mandated that group-based private health plans covering MH/SUD treatment do so in a way no more restrictive than coverage for general medical care. Multiple rounds of rulemaking, including 2024 final rules most recently, have strengthened federal regulation of plans' non-quantitative treatment limits (NQTLs).

Since its launch in 2007, the field of global mental health has generated substantial research on the social determinants of mental health. Yet relatively little is known about how to intervene to address these social determinants: are such interventions feasible and effective? If they are effective, what are the mechanisms of these effects?

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered widespread lockdown measures, including a sudden and substantial increase in working from home arrangements. While intended to reduce virus transmission, these measures may have had unintended consequences for mental health. Remote work limits in-person interactions and alters work-life boundaries, potentially influencing psychological well-being. However, empirical research on the mental health effects of working from home -especially under involuntary conditions- is still limited.

Considering the importance of depression and anxiety disorders in the new century and one of the important causes of disability and lost years worldwide and imposing a huge cost on the global economy, economic burden studies to determine the location of costs and the consumption of medical resources in recent years have contributed a lot to health policymaking. During the studies, it was found that the prevalence of these disorders increased significantly in Iran. This reason, along with the difference in the results of studies on the economic burden of depression and anxiety published in Iran in recent years, was one of the reasons for conducting a study of the economic burden related to these disorders in the East Azarbaijan province of Iran.

Suicide continues to be a major problem worldwide. Persons with a lived experience are being actively involved in suicide research and reports suggest that co-production of suicide research with persons with a lived experience significantly improves its quality and appropriateness.

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered widespread lockdown measures, including a sudden and substantial increase in working from home arrangements. While intended to reduce virus transmission, these measures may have had unintended consequences for mental health. Remote work limits in-person interactions and alters work-life boundaries, potentially influencing psychological well-being. However, empirical research on the mental health effects of working from home -especially under involuntary conditions- is still limited.

Mental health issues can impact overall health status, personal relationships, workplace productivity, and other outcomes.

There is extensive evidence on the associations between mental disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), conduct disorder (CD), oppositional/defiant disorder (ODD), and anxiety/depression and delinquency among youths. However, research has largely overlooked the potential confounding from comorbidity of these mental disorders as well as unobserved familial heterogeneity.

The enduring repercussions of long COVID have emerged as a distinct health concern, encompassing both physical and mental health challenges, such as symptoms indicative of anxiety and depression.

Value-based reimbursement (VBR) has become increasingly common among medical practitioners but mental health practitioners (MHPs) have largely remained in fee-for-service (FFS) arrangements. Aligning payment incentives to clinical outcomes rather than volume of services, VBR aspires to achieve health care's quadruple aim, namely improved patient experience, improved population health, reduced costs, and improved work life of health care providers.

With over 40 million food insecure Americans, access to food is a significant policy challenge. Food insecurity is associated with many adverse health conditions, including poorer mental health outcomes. However, previous research generally does not address that poor mental health can both be a cause and a consequence of food insecurity.

Persistent depressive disorder (PDD; chronic depression) is associated with high personal, economic, and societal burden. Patients with PDD often fail to respond to treatment, despite long-term, intensive care, suggesting that future treatment should focus more on functional recovery. The "Patient and Partner Education Program for All Chronic Diseases-Persistent Depressive Disorder" (PPEP4All-PDD) is a brief self-management program for patients with PDD with nine weekly sessions, provided in group or individual format. Its focus on functional recovery may increase quality of life and shorten treatment duration, thus reducing healthcare and societal costs. This study examined the cost-effectiveness of PPEP4All-PDD for adults and elderly with PDD and their partners/caregivers compared to care-as-usual (CAU).

Mental ill-health-illness or conditions related to mental health, including dementia, schizophrenia, mood (affective) disorders, and mental and behaviour disorders due to psychoactive substance and alcohol use - places a significant burden on society in terms of economic, health, and social costs. Focusing on direct health care costs, estimated expenditures on treating mental health conditions accounted for up to 14% of total health expenditures across 12 OECD countries over the period of 2003 to 2010.

Childhood disruptive behaviour disorder associates with various, also costly problems. Parent training is effective in reducing childhood disruptive behaviour. Only a few studies have evaluated the cost-effectiveness of digital parent training in reducing children's disruptive behaviour.

Cryptocurrency trading has become popular with a large section of society, and the number of investors is increasing daily. It is critical to address the health impacts of cryptocurrency trading. Of particular importance is the issue of how such trading affects mental health. Research should be conducted on this topic, and where necessary, national governments should develop policies to combat these effects.

Dr. Esther Duflo, Nobel Laureate in Economics, and co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) sat down with Dr. Benjamin Cook for a "fireside chat" at the 12th National Institute of Mental Health Global Mental Health Research Without Borders Conference. Dr. Duflo discussed J-PAL's efforts to develop and test interventions for improving mental health and how cash transfer programs can be used to improve mental health. She also discussed the importance of using randomized control trials (RCTs) in shaping global mental health initiatives. Dr. Duflo shared insights from projects addressing loneliness among older individuals in India, secondary school scholarships in Ghana, and other studies that have informed social policies. Looking forward, she discusses climate change as a threat to the reductions in poverty realized in the last 30 years and encourages the expansion of networks of research and policy collaborations to improve global health.

Maternal depression is the most prevalent mental health problem worldwide, especially in low- and middle-income countries. It impairs the cognitive, physical, and social abilities of mothers and disturbs effective parenting practices. Therefore, the consequences of mental, physical, and social suffering are not limited to the mother herself but are transmitted to future generations by negatively affecting the child's health.

The economic cost of perinatal mood and anxiety disorders (PMADs) is high and includes the cost of reduced maternal economic productivity, more preterm births, and increases in other maternal mental health expenditures. PMADs also substantially contribute the cost of maternal morbidity. This paper offers a discussion of the quality-of-care cascade model of PMADs, which outlines care pathways that people typically face as well as gaps and unmet needs that frequently happen along the way. The model uses the US health system as an example. A discussion of international implications follows.

Consensus-guidelines for prescribing antidepressants recommend that clinicians should be vigilant to match antidepressants to patient's medical history but provide no specific advice on which antidepressant is best for a given medical history.

The economic burden of chronic psychotic disorders is substantial. However, few studies have employed an incidence based approach to estimate the economic burden of chronic psychotic disorders. Furthermore, the existing work has mainly used models populated with data obtained from published literature, making several assumptions to estimate incidence-based costs.

Aligning cost of mental health care with expected clinical and functional benefits of that care would incentivize the delivery of high value treatments and services. In turn, ineffective or untested care could still be offered but at costs high enough to offset the delivery of high value care.

Effective financing mechanisms are essential to ensuring that people can access and utilize effective treatments and services. Financing mechanisms are needed not only to pay for the delivery of those treatments and services, but also ancillary costs, while also keeping care affordable.

In the US, much of the research into new intervention and delivery models for behavioral health care is funded by research institutes and foundations, typically through grants to develop and test the new interventions. The original grant funding is typically time-limited. This implies that eventually communities, clinicians, and others must find resources to replace the grant funding -otherwise the innovation will not be adopted. Diffusion is challenged by the continued dominance in the US of fee-for-service reimbursement, especially for behavioral health care.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been widely reported to have increased symptoms of anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues. It may also have significantly disrupted continuity of treatment for existing patients and made access for those newly seeking care more difficult at a time when treatment needs are higher.

Many individuals with serious mental illness (SMI) are capable of employment in regular jobs (i.e. jobs paying at least minimum wage, not set aside for persons with disabilities, and not obtained with assistance from mental health services), but they may need job accommodations to be successful. The extant literature focuses almost exclusively on accommodations for workers with SMI who are receiving employment support, so we know almost nothing about the nature or frequency of accommodations needed by workers who are independently employed.

While consumer cost-sharing is a widely used strategy to mitigate health care spending, numerous studies have demonstrated that even modest levels of out-of-pocket cost are associated with lower use of medical care, including clinically necessary, high-value services. Within mental health care, increases in cost-sharing are associated with reductions in use of mental health care and psychotropic medication use. Further, these reductions in mental health services and treatments can lead to downstream consequences including worsening of psychiatric illness and increased need for acute care and psychiatric hospitalization. Thus, there is a need for clinically informed solutions that explicitly balance the need for appropriate access to essential mental health services and treatments with growing fiscal pressures faced by public and private payers. Value-Based Insurance Design (VBID) describes a model where consumer cost-sharing is based on the potential clinical benefit rather than the price of a specific health care service or treatment.

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) remains committed to addressing real-world challenges with delivering high quality mental health care to people in need by advancing a services research agenda to improve access, continuity, quality, equity, and value of mental healthcare nationwide, and to improve outcomes for people with serious mental illnesses (SMI). The NIMH-Sponsored Mental Health Services Research Conference (MHSR) is a highly productive venue for discussing topics of interest to NIMH audiences and disseminating NIMH's latest research findings directly to mental health clinicians, policy makers, administrators, advocates, consumers, and scientists who attend.

Evidence-based treatments (EBTs) are critical to effectively address mental health problems among children and adolescents, but costly for mental health service agencies to implement and sustain. Financing strategies help agencies overcome cost-related barriers by obtaining financial resources to support EBT implementation and/or sustainment.

Per federal law, "988" became the new three-digit dialing code for the National Suicide & Crisis Lifeline on July 16, 2022 (previously reached by dialing "1-800-283-TALK").