The effect of user involvement in mental health and addiction: A gap map
Mapping review
|Published
The aim of this gap map was to map existing research on the effect of user involvement (including informal caregivers) on different levels within the fields of mental health and addiction and identify knowledge gaps.
Key message
User involvement is necessary to ensure well-adapted health services for individuals with mental illness and alcohol or substance use disorders. The aim of this gap map was to map existing research on the effect of user involvement (including informal caregivers) on different levels within the fields of mental health and addiction and identify knowledge gaps.
A research gap map is a systematic review that categorises and makes available research on broad topics visible. We searched for systematic reviews in eight online databases. We screened the identified references and coded the reviews that met our inclusion criteria according to a predefined framework. We included 54 systematic reviews.
Our main findings:
- We identified several systematic reviews that evaluate the effects of user involvement in mental health and addiction services
- Most of the reviews thematised interventions targeting mental health.
- We identified few reviews targeting persons with alcohol or substance use disorders
- The main part of the reviews thematised user involvement on an individual level, few were about the service level, and one thematised involvement on system level.
- We categorised 25 different interventions from 6 different settings.
It is worth noting that there might be sizeable amount of primary studies on the topic that are not covered by the included systematic reviews.