Emerging research methods in mental health

Mental health systems are often siloed approaches to care. Recent research efforts attempting to promote the interconnectedness of mental, physical, and social health, and transform systems into collaborative integrated networks provide a promising approach to integrating services. We focus on three contemporary research approaches underlying social work's person-in-environment perspective and are grounded in the third wave of systems thinking: spatial and geoinformation systems (GIS), computer simulation, and predictive analysis. An explosion of data and computational power have led to the application of computational approaches to social service research that has generated interdisciplinary approaches involving computer science and complexity theory. Spatial methods provide the foundation for computational and predictive methods because location matters. Social simulation models incorporate other methods into a simulation, particularly network analysis, geography, and complexity theory. Predictive analytics apply statistical techniques including different regression models, data modeling, data mining, and machine learning.