What is the impact of information interventions for mental health? An evaluation framework for policy makers, clinicians and researchers

Increasing awareness of mental health problems, including that of young people, is generally seenas positive and several interventions to increase awareness are underway internationally. Yet, aprincipled evaluation of benefits and harms of increasing awareness is still lacking.Here, we present a conceptual and mathematical framework for the evaluation of informationinterventions aimed at increasing public awareness of mental health problems. Borrowing frominfection spread and related population dynamic models, we show how benefits, but also harms,may accrue at substantial rates over time.Specifically, we model the links of a causal chain that starts with an attempt to increase publicawareness through an information intervention. This allows us to show such interventions changethe mental health awareness in the general public, influence the number of help seekers (i.e. thosewho seek help from mental health professionals), but may also, directly or indirectly, influence howclinicians practise and the accuracy of their diagnoses. Consequently, we show that informationinterventions can increase both benefits and harms to the general population, depending onindividual parameters that our framework can flexibly accommodate.In our paper, we detail the rigorous conceptual foundations and mathematical formalisms but alsooffer a novel software application that can be used by researchers and practitioners who wish topredict the effect of potential mental health information interventions, or evaluate the outcomes ofexisting ones.