Hello Linch. We’re reluctant to recommend organisations that we haven’t been able to vet ourselves but are planning to vet some new mental health and non-mental health organisations in time for Giving Season 2023. The details are in our Research Agenda. For mental health, we say
On how we chose StrongMinds, you’ve already found our selection process. Looking back at the document, I see that we don’t get into the details, but it wasn’t just procedural. We hadn’t done a deep dive analysis at the point—the point of the search process was to work out what we should look at in more depth—but our prior was that StrongMinds would come out at or close to the top anyway. To explain, it was delivering the intervention we thought would do most good per person (therapy for depression), doing this cheaply (via lay-delivered interpersonal group therapy) and it seems to be a well-run organisation. I thought Friendship Bench might beat it (Friendship Bench had a volunteer model and so plausibly much lower costs but also lower efficacy) but they didn’t offer us their data at the time, something they’ve since done. I don’t think I knew about Sangath or Corstone back then.
I think I would advise donors to wait until the end of this year. However, my money would be on Friendship Bench being the best MH org that isn’t StrongMinds and I wouldn’t rule out it being more cost-effective.
Thank you! I think if any of my non-EA friends ask about donating to mental health charities (which hasn’t happened recently but is the type of thing my friends sometimes asks about in the past), I’d probably recommend to them to adopt a “wait and see” attitude.
Hello Linch. We’re reluctant to recommend organisations that we haven’t been able to vet ourselves but are planning to vet some new mental health and non-mental health organisations in time for Giving Season 2023. The details are in our Research Agenda. For mental health, we say
On how we chose StrongMinds, you’ve already found our selection process. Looking back at the document, I see that we don’t get into the details, but it wasn’t just procedural. We hadn’t done a deep dive analysis at the point—the point of the search process was to work out what we should look at in more depth—but our prior was that StrongMinds would come out at or close to the top anyway. To explain, it was delivering the intervention we thought would do most good per person (therapy for depression), doing this cheaply (via lay-delivered interpersonal group therapy) and it seems to be a well-run organisation. I thought Friendship Bench might beat it (Friendship Bench had a volunteer model and so plausibly much lower costs but also lower efficacy) but they didn’t offer us their data at the time, something they’ve since done. I don’t think I knew about Sangath or Corstone back then.
I think I would advise donors to wait until the end of this year. However, my money would be on Friendship Bench being the best MH org that isn’t StrongMinds and I wouldn’t rule out it being more cost-effective.
Thank you! I think if any of my non-EA friends ask about donating to mental health charities (which hasn’t happened recently but is the type of thing my friends sometimes asks about in the past), I’d probably recommend to them to adopt a “wait and see” attitude.