RESEARCH WEEKLY: Find SMI research faster, easier

(Sept 13, 2016) Evidence about how severe mental illness impacts individuals and communities is systematically under-studied, overlooked or ignored by government agencies and other organizations. Findings often are barely accessible even when they are made. As we noted in a 2015 study, it’s easier to learn the average prenatal litter size of a feral cat in America than the number of civilians killed during encounters with law enforcement in the United States, much less the role of serious mental illness (SMI) in such deaths.

The Treatment Advocacy Center made a major investment in shrinking the information void in 2015 by establishing the Office of Research and Public Affairs (ORPA), the first new program since our founding in 1998. Besides creating new internal capacity to produce original research on critical issues like how long mentally ill inmates are waiting for hospital beds, by state, ORPA makes academic research into SMI easier to find and read with its Research Weekly summaries.

More Accessible, More Readable
With the launch of the Treatment Advocacy Center’s new and more navigable website, all the evidence and research that ORPA develops and publishes as a public service are easier to find and easier to read. Resources include:

• Fast Facts. Infobits developed from official government statistics to answer frequently asked questions including: How many American adults have schizophrenia or bipolar disorder? What’s the population of jail and prison inmates with SMI? How many suicides can be attributed to the most severe mental illnesses?
• Background Papers. Brief evidence-based summaries of research into key issues involving serious mental illness and its impacts on individuals and their communities including: What is anosognosia? How does mental illness disproportionately impact women? What is the role of SMI in homicide and suicide? What role does treatment have in stigma? References to the evidence are provided in PDF versions of each paper.
• TACReports. Links to Treatment Advocacy Center original and partnered research focusing on under-studied, overlooked or ignored topics such as the role of SMI in family homicide and a comparison of how unequally individual states use clozapine, the gold-standard medication for psychotic disorders.
• Preventable Tragedies Database. The most thorough public accounting of the role of mental illness among victims and perpetrators of violent acts in the United States.

Research Weekly
Research Weekly is a public service that provides the public with brief summaries of emerging peer-reviewed research on serious mental illness causation, treatments, medication, impacts, costs and related topics. Subscribers receive the summaries weekly on most Tuesdays, year-round. They are later published on the TreatmentAdvocacyCenter.org website. Recent samples include:

• Risks and rewards of using long-term antipsychotic medications to treat serious mental illness.
• Suicide rates and psychiatric bed populations about the association between shrinking access to mental health beds and the rising rate of suicide in the United States.
• Money and mental health about how mental illness impacts financial health.

Subscribing to Research Weekly is made easy on this simple sign-up form for the research digest and other Treatment Advocacy Center news.
See all the News and Features from the Treatment Advocacy Center on the new website.