MHA Screening aims to ensure every person who is in need of mental health support can screen and explore what mental health challenges they are facing.
They can find the information that resonates with their mental health needs and the tools they need to build skills for strength, growth, and resiliency. They can learn ways to connect online with others to reduce shame and fear, and the treatments that they need to create stability and whole health. MHA Screening works to identify the needs of individuals and communities and to create tools that respond to the individualized needs of users. MHA Screening will address these topic areas by expanding person-centered education, and do-it-yourself tools powered by crowd-sourcing, artificial intelligence, and emerging technology. These are researched as micro-interventions to address the needs of someone who wants help but doesn’t have access to immediate support.
History of Screening
MHA Screening was launched in 2014, with screens for depression, anxiety, bipolar, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Screening was launched to meet people with mental health resources where they are. This means two things:
- Provide screening in an online space. When people first start experiencing mental health problems, many don’t have access to mental health care, so they seek help and resources online. MHA Screening works to make sure that people have free access to clinically validated tools to check on their mental health where and how they are searching for them.
- Provide screening for people wherever they are in their mental health journey. Whether a person is experiencing symptoms of a mental health condition for the first time or needs additional support to maintain their condition, we want to make sure that people can access tools to address their own mental health without having to wait to reach a point of crisis before receiving resources.
Understanding the MHA Screening population
We serve 5 million users a year and these individuals provide insight on how we can continue to support our communities. Since the launch of screening, over 18 million people have completed an online screen, averaging about 15,000 screens a day. Here’s what we’ve learned about our population thus far:
Significant percentages of screeners are positive, but most have never been diagnosed and are not currently in treatment.
MHA’s screening population is a help-seeking population, many of whom have never been diagnosed with a mental health condition or treated for one or have stopped treatment in the past. Over 75% of our population screen “positive” or “moderate to severe for the condition for which they screened. Additionally, over half of those who screen positive have never been diagnosed with or received treatment in the past.
MHA screeners are young, female, and representative of the racial and ethnic diversity of the population.
Mental health concerns are concentrated among younger people. Among MHA’s 3 million screeners who provided their age, 75 percent were under the age of 25, with half of that group under the age of 18. Young people experience more moderate to severe depression and anxiety than all other age groups.
Our data indicates that our screening population is nearly split 50/50 between white and BIPOC screeners, with a significant number of our BIPOC screeners identifying as Hispanic/Latino and Black/African-American. In addition, many screeners have self-identified as students, LGBTQ, caregivers, military, and trauma survivors.
Since January 2020, MHA has seen an increase in the number of mental health screens and severity of results that mirror the growing concerns from both the COVID-19 pandemic and race-based trauma.
In an effort to build collaboration on real-time data, MHA is working to publish regular analyses of our data as it relates to COVID-19 and race. We’ve published our findings in How Race Matters: What We Can Learn from Mental Health America’s Screening in 2020 and Mental Health and COVID-19 Two Years After Pandemic.
People seeking help for their mental health are also frequently living with other serious chronic health conditions.
Many of our screeners report living with other chronic health conditions such as chronic pain, arthritis, COPD, diabetes, and heart disease. People seeking help are not just looking for referrals to treatment services, they are also looking for information, peer and family support, and tools they can use themselves.
As a result of our findings, we have expanded the MHA Screening Program in a number of ways:
- Increased the number of free mental health screens available;
- Expanded and researched post-screening resources to provide relevant and engaging content based on lessons from the screening program;
- Gathered insights about population health in various reports, including State of Mental Health in America and The State and County Mapping Project;
- Fostered meaningful collaborations with universities, mental health platforms, tech giants, and robust research teams.
Support for organizations and individuals
Catching mental health conditions early and understanding how symptoms are impacting lives can empower individuals to start a conversation with their doctor or a loved one about mental health. Although not a diagnosis, an anonymous mental health screen can determine whether people are experiencing symptoms of a mental health condition and help in understanding where people are with their mental health, finding a starting point for getting more information and starting a conversation.
Support for organizations
- Organizations are free to link to MHA Screening to provide free screening to their community. If you are using our resources, we ask that you properly cite our materials and link back to the website with a hyperlink. MHA has created specific screening materials for print. If you’re interested in receiving those, please email Khendra Lucas at klucas@mhanational.org.
- Currently, MHA affiliates are the only organizations that are working with MHA to receive de-identified data to support expansion of their policy and programs. MHA also provides de-identified data to researchers across the country to support our mission. To learn more about our research goals and processes, please see our past research and current projects.
- MHA has created guidance for schools that are interested in implementing mental health screenings in schools.
Support for individuals and families
Analysis of MHA Screening data from 2014 – 2016 helped us identify the needs and gaps in care faced by people who were struggling with mental health problems for the first time in their lives. When users come to our site we want to ensure they have the resources, knowledge, and opportunity to learn and build skills to create stability in early recovery.
Through MHA Screening, MHA is addressing several challenges facing the online mental health space:
- How to best support individuals who are seeking help for the first time.
- How to best support individuals who hesitate to seek treatment.
- How to create content and user experiences that will increase engagement, understanding, and recovery.
- What kinds of anonymous online support can be used to supplement and enhance traditional mental health treatment systems.
People seeking help for their mental health are also frequently living with other serious chronic health conditions.
Many of our screeners report living with other chronic health conditions such as chronic pain, arthritis, COPD, diabetes, and heart disease. People seeking help are not just looking for referrals to treatment services, they are also looking for information, peer and family support, and tools they can use themselves.
As a result of our findings, we have expanded the MHA Screening Program in a number of ways:
- Increased the number of free mental health screens available;
- Expanded and researched post-screening resources to provide relevant and engaging content based on lessons from the screening program;
- Gathered insights about population health in various reports, including State of Mental Health in America and The State and County Mapping Project;
- Fostered meaningful collaborations with universities, mental health platforms, tech giants, and robust research teams.
Take a Mental Health Test
Online screening is one of the quickest and easiest ways to determine whether you are experiencing symptoms of a mental health condition.