2026-08-07 — Opened (ben-steer)

• Opened as a dedicated child thread of mh-evidence-watch, seeded from the EBP therapy-science research crawl. (EBP therapy-science crawl, 2026-08-07) ⟨steer 2026-08-07⟩

2026-08-07 — PHTI has gone quiet on mental health specifically

• No 2026 follow-up to PHTI’s May 2025 mental-health assessment has been published; PHTI’s most recent 2026 output is a cross-cutting payment report, and its next named assessment targets GI conditions. No published horizon date exists anywhere for the Peterson Foundation’s “$50 million” founding commitment either — every source, including PHTI’s own site, calls it “initial” or “seed” funding with no stated end date. (PHTI, PHTI assessments) (wave: mh-q04) ⟨daily 2026-08-07⟩

2026-07-23 — CHAI answers the “will it credential?” question with a deliberate no

• CHAI’s Mental Health Chatbot work group (Headspace, Mental Health America, National Health Council, Stanford, others) published a Best Practice Guide and a Testing & Evaluation Framework for generative-AI wellness/mental-health apps — CHAI’s first concrete 2026 mental-health output — and it explicitly is not a certification or pass/fail standard. Evidence for a “capture deferred, not resolved” reading of CHAI’s 2025 pivot away from its failed Assurance Labs model. (CHAI) (wave: mh-q04) ⟨daily 2026-08-07⟩

2026-07-07 — Done Global’s He and Brody get the first federal prison sentences for digital-MH executives

• Judge Charles Breyer sentenced Done Global founder/CEO Ruthia He to 72 months (6 years) plus a $1 million fine, and clinical president David Brody to 24 months (2 years) plus a $1 million fine — the first federal criminal prison sentences ever imposed on digital mental-health-company executives, closing the arc DOJ opened with the June 2024 arrests. The date had itself been continued once already, from an earlier April 28, 2026 setting. (DOJ) (wave: mh-q04) ⟨daily 2026-08-07⟩

2026-03 — 70+ signatories demand NICE finally update its 2011 anxiety guideline

• A March 2026 stakeholder letter with more than 70 signatories calls on NICE to update its anxiety guideline (CG113), which has remained substantively unchanged since 2011 — a live campaign, distinct from the already-updated (and separately contested) depression guideline below. (Psychotherapy.org.uk) ⟨steer 2026-08-07⟩

2026-02-03 — Congress rejects the NIH funding cut and consolidation; grant-litigation stays open on a separate track

• The FY2026 appropriations law, signed February 3, 2026, rejected the administration’s proposed 27-institute-to-8 NIH consolidation and the $47B→$29B budget cut outright — the structural-collapse scenario didn’t happen at the budget level. The grant-by-grant litigation is a separate, still-open track: the First Circuit heard the guidance-side appeal January 6, 2026 (following the Supreme Court’s August 2025 jurisdictional ruling shunting grant-termination claims to the Court of Federal Claims, which can pay damages but can’t force reinstatement), with no ruling yet. (ACLU) (wave: mh-q04) ⟨daily 2026-08-07⟩

2026-01-20 — BACP joins the NICE anxiety-guideline campaign; NICE still hasn’t replied

• The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy formally backed the campaign to update NICE’s unchanged-since-2011 anxiety guideline — escalating professional-body pressure ahead of the March 2026 stakeholder letter above — with no NICE response found as of this check. (Psychotherapy.org.uk) (wave: mh-q04) ⟨daily 2026-08-07⟩

2025 — The US federal funding shock: NIMH hit hardest of any NIH institute

• NIMH lost 128 grants in the February-August 2025 NIH grant-termination wave — the most of any NIH institute — out of 694 grants terminated NIH-wide; 383 NIH-funded clinical trials were terminated, affecting more than 74,000 participants. The FY2026 budget proposal would cut total NIH funding from $47B to $29B while consolidating 27 institutes into 8. This is arguably the single most consequential development for the entire evidence base this strand tracks — the structural shock sits underneath essentially every meta-analysis and trial cited across the other EBP threads. (AJMC; The Transmitter) ⟨steer 2026-08-07⟩

2025 — NHS Talking Therapies: official success story vs. a placebo-equivalence critique

• NHS England’s official annual statistics claim roughly 50% recovery and two-thirds significant improvement since 2017 (670,000 people treated in 2023/24; IPT the highest-recovery high-volume therapy at 48.7%; CBT plus guided self-help making up 71.9% of all courses) — but a peer-reviewed critique (Scott, Counselling and Psychotherapy Research) argues completer outcomes are statistically indistinguishable from published placebo effect sizes for the same disorders (citing Bschor et al. 2024’s within-subject placebo estimates), that the official framing effectively excludes the 45% who don’t complete treatment, and that there has never been an independently funded outside evaluation of the service — one of the most-cited scaled psychotherapy-delivery models in the world, and a live, unresolved fight over whether its own numbers can be trusted. Scott’s critique has no direct URL captured in the underlying research crawl. (NHS Digital) ⟨steer 2026-08-07⟩

2025 — APA’s PTSD guideline downgrades EMDR; a formal published critique disagrees

• The APA’s 2025 PTSD Clinical Practice Guideline update ranks EMDR second-line, behind CPT, prolonged exposure, and trauma-focused CBT — a formal published critique in the Journal of EMDR Practice and Research argues this is out of step with five other national and international guidelines that treat EMDR as equivalent to first-line trauma therapies, and that APA’s own stated concerns (long-term gains, adverse effects, comorbidity outcomes, cross-cultural acceptability) are inconsistent with the evidence APA itself cites — not a fringe objection, but a peer-reviewed venue directly contesting a peer-reviewed guideline. APA’s separate depression guideline (still the 2019 version) is mid-update, with a new multidisciplinary panel appointed in 2025 and no output yet. (Science Partner Journals) ⟨steer 2026-08-07⟩

2025 — Cochrane expands into Global Mental Health amid a standing “gold standard tarnished” critique

• Cochrane launched a dedicated Global Mental Health branch, based in Verona, focused on LMIC evidence synthesis and capacity-building — alongside a standing critique (still actively cited in 2024-2025 discourse) that Cochrane’s mental-health reviews suffer from datedness, narrow evidence-type inclusion criteria, and diagnostic-category assumptions that don’t map well onto real clinical populations. (Cochrane; standing critique) ⟨steer 2026-08-07⟩

2023-03 — Cochrane retires its Common Mental Disorders review group

• The Cochrane Common Mental Disorders (CCMD) group — the field’s dedicated systematic-review group — was retired at the end of March 2023 (per York CRD and Cochrane’s own pages), with the Verona-based Global Mental Health branch above as its informal successor. Verified directly against Cochrane’s site during the 2026-08-07 feed-verification pass (which also confirmed the successor site has no RSS feed — no MH-specific Cochrane feed exists to subscribe to). The retirement is why “who referees the MH evidence base” is a live question rather than a rhetorical one. ⟨steer 2026-08-07⟩

2022-06 — NICE updates its depression guideline after a five-year, contested process

• NICE’s depression guideline (NG222) update took five years and drew formal stakeholder pushback over methodology — critics argued it excluded UK pragmatic/real-world NHS trial data, drew unsupported distinctions between depression subtypes, and underweighted patient experience. The predicate for the still-unresolved anxiety-guideline campaign above. (NICE; stakeholder position statement) ⟨steer 2026-08-07⟩

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