Large-scale community treatment for mental health
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P. K., Maulik and colleagues (2026) conducted a large-scale study of the effects of a public campaign designed to counter stigma for youths with mental health issues. They followed for a year almost 4000 10-to19-year-old children who lived in impoverished neighborhoods in different areas of Indian cities.
They delivered the intervention in randomly assigned separate neighborhoods while other neighborhoods served as controls. In Delhi, 30 clustered neighborhoods with over 2000 children were randomly assigned to treatment or control; in Vijayawada 30 other neighborhoods with nearly 1800 individuals were also assigned to conditions. Treatment groups received the specialized suite .
The campaign included printed materials, videos, games, street plays, magic shows, and audio dramas... based on the principles of social contact. The core elements reinforced help-seeking, enhanced empathy toward adolescents with mental disorders, increased mental health awareness, and addressed stigma related to mental health. Resources were adapted to local context and language. The materials were pilot tested before finalizing.
Professor Maulik and her colleagues found that children in the the neighborhoods where the intervention was provided had better scores on a checklist-interview measure called “Knowledge Attitude Behavior” that they said assessed anticipated behavior toward others with mental illness (effect size = 0.20). Some other outcome measures (e.g., depression) showed improvements in a beneficial direction, but not enough to make clear that the differences could be attributed to the treatment.
This is one of multiple studies by this research team examining what they call “digital mental health.” It was part of the Adolescents Resilience and Treatment Need for Methnal Health in Indian Slums (ARTEMIS) project; see, for example, Maulik et al. (2024) for a different example. Although the studies seem to employ reasonable scientific methods and they test an interesting approach, the results of the studies have not been stunning. Part of the reason for modest results is likely that it is a challenge to have such broad treatments implemented (although the authors have endeavored to implement their treatments with fidelity). Another problem is that the measures they used may be insensitive or capturing the wrong outcomes.
News reports from Medical Xpress and EurekAlert present pretty rosy views of this study:
Reference
Maulik, P. K., Yatirajula, S. K., Kallakuri, S. Palawan, S., Ghosh, A., Rastogi, A., Mukherjee, M., Khan, R., Sagar, R., Lemma, H., Kumar, A., Billot, L., Essue, B. M., Charrerjee. S., Singh, R., Peiris, D., Norton, R., & Thornicroft, G. (2026). Adolescent mental health care and stigma: The ARTEMIS randomized clinical trial. JAMA Psychiatry. Published online 29 April 2026. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2026.0603
Maulik, P. K., Daniel, M., Devarapalli, S., Kallakuri, S., Kaur, S., Ghosh, A., Billot, L., Mukherjee, A., Sagar, R., Kant, S., Chatterjee, S., Essue, B. M., Raman, U., Praveen, D., Thornicroft, G., Shekhar, S., Patel, A., & Peiris, D. (2024). Mental health care support in rural India: A cluster randomized clinical trail. JAMA Psychiatry, 81(11), 1061–1070. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2024.2305