Programs and policies for mental health: High-Quality data
Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a serious and common mental disorder worldwide. Not only does MDD limit a person’s ability to function, it also worsens many other health problems. For example, people with MDD may have difficulty following treatment or prevention plans for other illnesses. The prevalence and consequences make programs and policies to reduce MDD important. We need data to guide interventions but, if data quality is low, we will greatly underestimate the total number of people who experience MDD episodes. And MDD is only one of many different mental disorders. Programs and policies aiming to improve mental health and mental disorder treatment in the population need accurate measures of the prevalence of specific types of mental disorders. This includes a need for data that document the specific types of common experiences most likely to produce episodes of mental disorder. Unfortunately, measurement of mental disorders is not easy. For any data that exist there is always a process that creates the data. And a low-quality process creates low quality data. When used to guide policy makers’ decisions, low quality data leads to low quality decisions.
