Population mental health science

On February 25, 2022, APA’s Council of Representatives adopted a resolution to support population health. As a step toward this goal, the APA Population Health Science Summit was held September 12–13, 2023. The summit provided an urgent call to transition psychological science and practice away from a solely individual-level focus and toward becoming accountable for population-level impacts on health and mental health. In an article published in American Psychologist, Dodge et al. summarize key points of the summit.

The goals of a population focus are to ensure the mental health and well-being of all children, adolescents, and adults in a population and to eliminate inequities in mental health and well-being across demographic groups. According to Dodge et al., the transformation from individual level focus to a population focus will involve at least three components. First, effective individual-level interventions (the hallmark of current psychology) must be scaled up to the population level by using principles from implementation science, investing in novel digital and automated (e.g., online, mobile application, text, interactive voice response, and machine-learning-based) intervention delivery systems, harnessing the strength of diverse providers, and forging culturally informed adaptations.

Second, policy-driven community-level interventions must be innovated and tested. A population approach affords opportunities to implement exciting novel interventions that would be cost prohibitive if applied to only an individual or a small group but might become highly cost beneficial if applied to the population, such as broad efforts to promote physical activity, public policies to support families with young children, and regulation of corporal punishment in schools.

Third, a population approach requires a new system of universal primary care for mental health. Using primary care in health as a model, primary mental health care will include universal reach, strength-based assessment, a focus on prevention, a graded system of increasingly intense care as problems become more severe, and a broad network of diverse evidence-based intervention resources available to families on the basis of individually identified needs. Current evidence-based models of psychological interventions show how primary mental health care might become reality. A new system of primary mental health care must incorporate valid measurement, universal screening, and a community-based infrastructure for service delivery.

Becoming accountable for the full population will ensure that psychology addresses long-standing disparities in processes, resources, and outcomes across groups defined by race, ethnicity, advantage, and geography. Innovations in science are needed to understand universal and group-specific psychological processes and outcomes. A broad array of interventions is needed to improve outcomes for each group. Reform in public policy is needed to ensure that population outcomes improve while disparities are eliminated.

Summit participants agreed that a crucial first step is to implement a national measurement plan of regular surveillance of population-level mental health and well-being in different age, geographic, and cultural groups. Crucial indicators of the economy (e.g., inflation, unemployment), physical health (e.g., mortality rates due to cancers), and education (e.g., end-of-grade test scores, graduation rates) are known to drive public interest and policy. Indicators of mental health could have comparable impact on driving a national movement to improve the nation’s mental health. Shifting psychology to a population focus will require scientific creativity and discovery, rigorous evaluation, and community accountability. The development of a comprehensive strategic plan for addressing these challenges will help to shape the emergent field of public mental health.

This article is in the Core of Psychology topic area.

Dodge, K. A., Prinstein, M. J., Evans, A. C., Ahuvia, I. L., Alvarez, K., Beidas, R. S., Brown, A. J., Cuijpers, P., Denton, E., Hoagwood, K. E., Johnson, C., Kazdin, A. E., McDanal, R., Metzger, I. W., Rowley, S. N., Schleider, J., & Shaw, D. S. (2024). Population mental health science: Guiding principles and initial agenda. American Psychologist, 79(6), 805–823. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001334

Kenneth A. Dodge, PhD, is the William McDougall professor of Public Policy at Duke University and a clinical and developmental psychologist. He studies the development and prevention of aggressive behavior in children and families and how public policies can be shaped to lower child abuse rates and improve child well-being in the population. Contact Dodge.

Mitchell J. Prinstein, PhD, ABPP, is the chief science officer of APA, and he serves as the John Van Seters Distinguished professor of psychology and neuroscience and the codirector of the Winston National Center on Technology Use, Brain, and Psychological Development at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Arthur C. Evans, PhD, is the CEO of APA. He previously served as commissioner of Philadelphia’s behavioral health system and deputy commissioner of Connecticut’s. He has held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. He has applied a population health framework at scale to enhance clinical outcomes and reduce disparities with a broad range of interventions, including public policy, evidence-based practices, cultural responsiveness, and community empowerment.

Isaac L. Ahuvia, MA, is a PhD candidate in clinical psychology at Stony Brook University, where he studies individual beliefs about mental health and illness and the consequences of these beliefs for clinical outcomes.

Kiara Alvarez, PhD, is a Bloomberg assistant professor of american health in the Department of Health, Behavior, and Society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a licensed psychologist. Her research focuses on youth mental health equity with an emphasis on preventing suicidal behavior; integrating mental health care into primary care, schools, and community settings; and promoting the well-being of Latinx and immigrant youths and their families.

Rinad S. Beidas, PhD, is chair and Ralph Seal Paffenbarger professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and is a psychologist and implementation scientist. Her research leverages insights from implementation science and behavioral economics to make it easier for clinicians, leaders, and organizations to transform the quality and equity of care.

Ashanti J. Brown, MA, is a PhD student in the clinical psychology program at Georgia State University. Her research and clinical approaches are grounded in a holistic modality that explores the mind–body connection, aiming to reduce mental health disparities and improve culturally tailored interventions for racially or ethnically minoritized individuals who have experienced trauma, oppression, and intergenerational trauma. As a registered yoga teacher, she integrates mindfulness and meditation into her clinical practice and research, leveraging yoga as a tool for healing race-based stress and trauma.

Pim Cuijpers, PhD, is professor emeritus of clinical psychology and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Research and Dissemination of Psychological Interventions at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His research focuses on methods to reduce the disease burden of depression at the population level by prioritizing prevention and increasing the uptake and the improvement of treatments.

Ellen-ge Denton, PsyD, is an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center and a licensed psychologist, with postdoctoral training in pediatric psychology, public health, and clinical research methods. She studies suicide prevention and intervention and mental health capacity development in resource-limited settings.

Kimberly Eaton Hoagwood, PhD, is the Cathy and Stephen Graham professor of child and adolescent psychology in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine. Her work focuses on improving systems so that they deliver high-quality services for children, adolescents, and their families.

Christina Johnson, MPH, is the director of research operations on Rinad S. Beidas’s team at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. She oversees the team’s research portfolio, which consists of studies that are being conducted to close research-to-practice gaps using insights from implementation science and behavioral economics, with the goal of improving health and health care equity.

Alan E. Kazdin, PhD, is Sterling professor of psychology and child psychiatry (emeritus) at Yale University. His research has focused primarily on the treatment of aggressive and antisocial behavior in children and adolescents and parenting practices more generally. Currently, his work focuses on world mental health and scalable interventions for mental disorders.

Riley McDanal, MA, is a PhD candidate at Stony Brook University. Her research focuses on the scalable implementation of transdiagnostic interventions for adolescent and young adult populations. She also studies LGBTQ+ mental health, with particular attention to disparities in psychopathology levels and treatment effectiveness.

Isha W. Metzger, PhD, LCP, is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Georgia State University, adjunct graduate faculty at the University of Georgia, and affiliate research faculty at Yale University. Her work is aimed at informing and adapting evidence-based treatments to increase service use and improve outcomes for Black youths, families, and adults engaged in community mental health.

Sonia N. Rowley, BA, is a PhD student in clinical and developmental psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. She studies the implementation of family-based preventive interventions, with a focus on improving the accessibility and quality of such interventions in community settings.

Jessica Schleider, PhD, is an associate professor of medical social sciences, pediatrics, and psychology at Northwestern University, where she directs the Lab for Scalable Mental Health. Her work focuses on building, testing, and disseminating scalable mental health solutions that bridge gaps in mental health systems, with a focus on digital and single-session interventions for underserved youths.

Daniel S. Shaw, PhD, is a distinguished professor of psychology and director of the Center for Parents and Children and the Pitt Parents and Children Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh. His primary research interests have been studying the development and prevention of early problem behavior in children facing contextual adversities.