Cost-Outcome Methods for Mental Health

"In summary, this book would serve as an excellent resource for graduates and postgraduates involved in mental health outcome research. While many chapters are technical and dense in nature, this book was exciting to read in that it encouraged me, as a scientist-practitioner, to consider innovative models for integrating fiscal responsibility with effective service delivery."—JOURNAL OF CLINICAL PSYCHIATRY 61:4, April 2000

"This excellent book is engaging, clear, practical, and scientifically sound. It will enable mental health services researchers from a variety of backgrounds both to understand the literature on cost studies and to participate in such studies. Clearly the best available primer in the field, it should be a welcome resource for researchers and students alike."—ROBERT E. DRAKE, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry, Psychiatric Research Center, Lebanon, New Hampshire

"This book combines the right authors with a timely and useful subject. Like their previous works, it is certain to be well received."—HOWARD H. GOLDMAN, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore

"Cost-Outcome Methods for Mental Health is a timely textbook that helps fill a yawning gap in mental health services research - a field that has produced so few published cost-outcomes studies that the authors resort to examples from medicine rather than mental health. Recognizing the elementary phase of development of the field, the authors wisely point out that their goal is to help readers learn a new vocabulary and become intelligent consumers of cost-outcome research findings."—Barbara Dickey, Ph.D. in PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES, April 1999

"A great virtue of this book - in addition to its excellent attention to "how to"- is its focus on "why": why we have a responsibility to understand costs in addition to outcomes in mental health treatment research. The book highlights the fact that analysis of costs goes beyond statistics, into societal values...Perhaps the greatest strength of this book, however, is its extraordinary clarity in describing how to actually conduct cost-outcome research."—PSYCHOTHERAPY RESEARCH, December 1998

"This book provides a primer of cost-outcome methods in mental health services research. The authors' intention is to introduce those without a background in economics to 'applied economic methods of costoutcome research' and those with a background in research design and statistics to the specific methods of 'services research in mental health.' With ten chapters...the book provides a comprehensive description of many issues of cost-outcome research, and contains numerous useful examples for those new to mental health services research as well as to applied economic analysis. The book may also be suitable as a basic text for a graduate seminar in cost-outcome methods in mental health if it is supplemented with primary source material...Overall, this book accomplishes what no other text in the field has yet to do—it covers ground that will be useful to both health economists and mental health outcome researchers...The authors have accomplished no small feat in providing the field with a valuable new reference that provides a fair and reasoned summary of cost-outcome methods for mental health."—MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES RESEARCH

"The book is a practical guide rather than a theoretical treatment of cost-effectiveness analysis. Toward this end, readers who do not have a background in economics are introduced to the application of economic methods of cost-outcome research, and are prepared for productive collaboration with economists in mental health services research."—ADMINISTRATION AND POLICY IN MENTAL HEALTH (May 1999)