Broad Mental Health Research Report

Our research partners, CEARCH, produced a wide-ranging report on mental health in January 2024. The entire report is available here, with the key findings detailed below. This was really a page-turner for us; if you are interested in global mental health and like to take a quantified lens to your grantmaking work, it’s worth taking a closer look.

Key Findings

• Cost is generally the most important variable in assessing mental health interventions, and it can vary widely

• Interpersonal group therapy is a promising way of improving mental health provision in poor countries, although the scale of the effect of psychotherapy is unclear. Technology may allow psychotherapy to be delivered more cheaply and at scale.

• Tackling risk factors can prevent mental illness. Policy advocacy could be a good lever for doing this.

• Suicide prevention appears to be highly neglected in poor countries.

• Mental illness will increase in relative importance over time, so we should place a premium on any work that increases our understanding of how to mitigate it