Conclusion
Mental health services research is a new and growing area in mental health. Services research addresses questions that are significant to all stakeholders, including patients, clinicians, and policy makers: What are the best ways to assure access to services? How can we best describe the treatments that patients receive? Which treatments are most effective with which types of patients? What are the best ways to affect clinician practices? These are all questions posed by services researchers. In this chapter we have noted that we do not know the answers to these questions. We have also described the political and methodologic difficulties encountered in trying to answer them. If we are to achieve any real progress in serving those who need services, then we need to answer these and similar questions with well-designed research.
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