Improving the Physical Health of People with a Mental Illness

Dear Colleagues,

People with mental illness experience significantly higher morbidity and mortality compared to people without. Globally, this is commonly reported as linked to preventable chronic disease and modifiable health risk behaviours, with approaches that target the physical health of people with a mental illness identified as a priority for national and international efforts.

This Special Issue welcomes papers of all study designs and from all world regions aimed at reducing inequity in physical health for people with a mental health condition. This includes work relating to reducing the prevalence of health risk behaviours and improving care for these and associated chronic diseases in people with a mental illness, particularly integrated care protocols for co-occurring mental illness and substance misuse, mental health care access for people with long term physical health concerns, other underserved areas and health care inequalities, and emerging care settings such as community managed, or third sector, organisations. We welcome a variety of articles focusing on, but not limited to co-design and/or co-development, service-user involvement, collaborative clinical care, implementation programs and interventions including addressing scaling up, effective translation of evidence into practice, sustainability, cost and/or economic evaluations, evidence syntheses, health system strengthening including integration of healthcare, health information systems and health indicators to address both physical and mental health, healthcare access, scale of physical health checks for people with mental health problems, innovative research designs and collaborative partnerships, and bridging research to practice to policy gaps. 

Dr. Julia Dray
Dr. Caitlin Fehily
Dr. Shalini Ahuja
Dr. Anam Bilgrami
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2500 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.