The Missing Piece: A Population Health Perspective to Address the U.S. Mental Health Crisis

In fact, the high prev- alence–or overall proportion–of mental disorders in the general population of the United States has been recognized for decades, documented first in the Epi- demiologic Catchment Area Survey carried out in the 1980s and confirmed in the 1990s with findings from the National Comorbidity Survey.1 These studies and many others conducted prior to the pandemic demonstrated that. [...] On the plus side, the maturation of social epidemiology, the discipline that focuses on how so- cial structural factors affect the distribution of health and well-being, over recent decades has shepherded the development of a set of robust tools that can help ad- dress the questions posed above.9 With sufficient investment of both human and financial capital, the scientific community and public he. [...] Across public health and medicine, in the face of calls to address the high burden of mental disorders in the population, the most common responses include discussing barriers to mental health care, ways to improve access to evidence- based treatments, and how to increase funding for developing new treatments. [...] However, mental health ranges across a large spectrum, and far less attention has been given to the antecedents and consequences of states of emotional well-being at the healthiest end of the mental health spectrum.27 This perspective is highly congruent with the World Health Organization’s definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absen. [...] Fuller, et al., “An Integrated Socio-Environmental Model of Health and Well-Being: A Conceptual Framework Ex- ploring the Joint Contribution of Environmental and Social Exposures to Health and 40 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Laura Sampson, Laura D.