Irsay Co-Director Kosali Simon co-authors special report in *The Lancet* examining why so many people who require mental healthcare are not getting it
March 26, 2024
The Lancet has released a special report from The Lancet Psychiatry Commission, co-authored by Irsay Co-Director Kosali Simon, looking at transforming mental health implementation research.
Effective mental health promotion, prevention, and treatment approaches exist but are not widely delivered at-scale to large groups or populations. Most people who could benefit from evidence-based mental health interventions —defined broadly to encompass policies, programs, and individual-level practices or services — do not receive them. This implementation gap is sometimes termed a know–do gap — we know what mental health interventions can work, but we often do not know how to do those interventions in real-world settings. The growing field of implementation research, which seeks to understand what, why, and how interventions work (or do not work) in real-world settings, aims to identify approaches to overcome barriers to scaling.
The Commission was established by The Lancet to enquire into transforming mental health implementation research. Commissioners include:
- Kosali Simon, O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University
- Maggie Alegria, Departments of Medicine and Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School
- Rinad Beidas, PhD, Medical Social Science at Northwestern University and MASSACHUESETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL
- Jeffrey Braithwaite, AIHI Macquarie University
- Lola Kola, Global Mental Health Programs, Columbia University
Doug Leslie, Penn State University - Emma McGinty, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
- Nathalie Moise, MD, MS, FAHA, Department of Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center @ColumbiaMed
- Bernardo Mueller, University of Brazil
- Harold Pincus, Columbia University
- Rahul Shidhaye, Pravara Institute of Medical Sciences, Ahmednagar
- Sara Singer, Stanford University School of Medicine
- Elizabeth Stuart, Johns Hopkins
- Matthew Eisenberg MD FAAP, Johns Hopkins