The Efficacy of Mental Health Outreach Programs to Religious Settings: A Systematic Review

The literature has documented the opportunities to improve mental health care by developing programs to work with clergy for identifying and supporting individuals with mental illness. A successful program would integrate and coordinate mental health service rehabilitative and treatment programs with religious community resources. The authors systematically reviewed the efficaciousness of providing mental health outreach to religious settings. Although many programs were found that had exhibited an impressive degree of integration and coordination between mental health and religious groups, only one had incorporated outcome measures. The lack of use of validated outcome measures severely limits our understanding of the utility of mental health outreach programs to religious settings. This is an important public health area for the development of research.