Cogent Mental Health welcomes articles developing a precise understanding of contextual factors and the processes of inequality in mental health treatment.
Empirical evidence broadly suggests that the socio-demographic and economic context an individual experiences may affect their mental health treatment outcomes, access, and utilisation. Socioeconomic deprivation is one such example. However, in many areas the literature remains either:
- imprecise, such that specific variables are used interchangeably in a unitary or tokenistic way to represent broader but often complex, multifaceted or multi-levelled phenomenon,
- conflicting or itself contextually varying,
- unbound to empirical evidence of the processes or mechanisms of effect by which the context affects the individual and their mental health treatment.
In order to improve outcomes for individuals, research is therefore greatly needed to refine our understanding of these effects. This call welcomes high quality papers that seek to disentangle confounders and correlates, pinpoint interactions or environments that moderate effects, seek to understand causal mechanisms or processes mediating contextual effects, and/or test interventions to reduce contextual inequalities.
This Article Collection will solicit articles related to the following subjects. However, we welcome all submissions related to the umbrella topic of psychological treatments in context.
- Unpacking or specifying the individual effects of socioeconomic deprivation, geographical clustering, community identities, organizational structures – and all their correlates – on psychological treatment outcomes
- The synthesis of contextual factors and process variables, alongside their mediators and moderators
- Understanding the relationships between contextual and individual domains on various aspects of mental health and psychological treatment
- Interventions or clinical applications to reduce contextual inequalities
Instructions for Authors
The following Article Types will be considered: basic and clinical, as well as epidemiological original research, meta-analyses, systematic and scoping reviews, narrative reviews, and commentaries.
When submitting your article, please select the Special Issue, ‘Psychological Treatment in Context – precision understanding of contextual factors and the processes of inequality’ from the drop-down menu on the submission system.
