Mental Disorders and Treatment

In the fields of public health and research on mental health services, it is becoming more and more clear that individual clinical services are not a good way to meet a population's mental health needs. Population-based approaches to mental health have sparked a lot of interest, but little is known about what they entail and no evidence of their efficacy has been incorporated. This review provides a precise definition of populationbased 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 using research and scholarship from a variety of fields. These methods cover three areas: a) social, economic, and environmental policy interventions that legislators and directors of public agencies can carry out; b) public health practice interventions that public health department officials can carry out; and c) health care system interventions that hospital and system leaders can carry out.