Background: 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.
Aims: This Perspective summarizes and provides highlights from the 25th MHSR. It also reviews three papers presented at the 25th MSHR and subsequently published in the June 2023 special issue of The Journal of Mental Health Policy and Economics (JMHPE).
Methods: The authors review three papers published in the June 2023 special issue of JMHPE, identifying common themes across the papers and illustrating how the papers' findings promote key areas of NIMH research interests.
Results: Three important areas are highlighted in this review: (i) service user engagement in the research enterprise, (ii) financing the implementation of the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and (iii) methods to predict mental health workforce turnover.
Discussion: These three papers illustrate key areas in which policy research can help to promote quality mental health care. One notable common theme across the papers is that of the role that end users play in the research enterprise. The papers focus on (i) service users and the value they bring to informing the practice of research, (ii) policy makers and the information they need to make evidence-informed decisions, and (iii) provider organization leadership, by using an innovative machine learning process to help organizations predict and address staff turnover.
Implications for health care: NIMH encourages and often requires strong research practice partnerships to help ensure findings will be of value to end users and make their way into the practice setting. The three papers reviewed in this perspective are exemplars of how necessary stakeholder partnerships are to improve care for those with mental illness.
Implications for health policies: The highlighted papers (i) provide recommendations for structural changes to research institutions to increase service user engagement in all aspects of the research enterprise, (ii) identify policy solutions to improve fiscal readiness to address increased demand of 988, and (iii) pilot a novel data-driven approach to predict mental health workforce turnover, a significant problem in community mental health clinics, offering health system leaders and policy makers an opportunity to proactively intervene to help maintain continuity of staffing.
Implications for further research: Consistent with NIMH's Strategic Plan for Research and current funding announcements, there remains an urgent need to (i) develop strategies to better implement, scale, and sustain existing evidence-supported treatments and services, particularly in historically underserved communities, and (ii) develop, test, and evaluate new solutions to improve access, continuity, quality, equity, and value of care.ing and clinical outcomes remains uncertain.