HLI’s Mental Health Programme Evaluation Project (MHPEP) aims to find the most effective interventions that improve mental health. This short document sets out our approach and objectives.

Our approach
While there are potentially many ways in which we can make lives happier, improving mental health currently stands out as a particularly promising approach [1]. In our MHPEP, we try to find the most cost-effective programmes targeting common mental disorders. In doing so, we concentrate on evaluating interventions in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) on the assumption that treatments here will be more cost-effective. Once our evaluation is complete, we will disseminate our results to relevant stakeholders and donors in the field of global mental health.

We follow a three-step approach:

1. Identify evidence-based programmes which target mental health in a LMIC setting and make an initial assessment 
2. Gather further information on programmes which appear most promising after step (1), and preliminarily score their cost-effectiveness based on an HLI-developed scoring system
3. Create quantitative cost-effectiveness assessment of the programmes which seem most cost-effective after step 2.​​

Overview of our current progress

STEP 1 [COMPLETE]

• We started with mental health programmes listed on the Mental Health Innovation Network. In this network, researchers from all over the world working on mental health share their current work and present new approaches to treating mental health conditions. It currently lists 183 interventions. 
• Many innovations in this network are focused on depression and anxiety disorder, which are likely associated with the highest global burden of disease caused by mental disorders [2]. The team therefore agreed to focus on 75 of 183 listed interventions targeting those two conditions.
• We have developed a screening tool to make an initial assessment of cost-effectiveness and recruited eight raters who have sufficient academic background to screen the interventions. 
• We first tested the inter-rater reliability of our screening tool in two rounds, where raters screened six programmes each. Overall, we found inter-rater reliability to be sufficient (cp. here and here). ​
• A more detailed summary of the process will soon be published on the Effective Altruism Forum.

 STEP 2 [IN PROGRESS]

• For the second step, we are currently collecting further information on 25 interventions which appeared most promising after step (1). Web-based research has been completed for all interventions. 
• Using additional criteria, we have further narrowed down the number of programmes we aim to evaluate. 
• We have reached out to the most promising programmes already, and many are willing to cooperate. We are currently working out which information we particularly need to obtain to evaluate their cost-effectiveness, and will soon start interviewing the organisations behind the most promising programmes. 
• We are currently talking to different experts in the field of global mental health to make sure we are not missing out on any particularly promising programmes.

The screening team
We consist in volunteers drawn from the effective altruism community who are committed to promoting human happiness. Our academic backgrounds include psychology, health economics and philosophy, and our team members are graduates of Harvard, Cambridge, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

End notes
​[1] See Chapter 5, World Happiness Report (2017)
[2] Refer to the findings of the Global Burden of Disease Study

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