EA - Why SoGive is publishing an independent evaluation of StrongMinds by ishaan

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Why SoGive is publishing an independent evaluation of StrongMinds, published by ishaan on March 17, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Executive summaryWe believe the EA community's confidence in the existing research on mental health charities hasn't been high enough to use it to make significant funding decisions.Further research from another EA research agency, such as SoGive, may help add confidence and lead to more well-informed funding decisions.In order to increase the amount of scrutiny on this topic, SoGive has started conducting research on mental health interventions, and we plan to publish a series of articles starting in the next week and extending out over the next few months.The series will cover literature reviews of academic and EA literature on mental health and moral weights.We will be doing in-depth reviews and quality assessments on work by the Happier Lives Institute pertaining to StrongMinds, the RCTs and academic sources from which StrongMinds draws its evidence, and StrongMinds' internally reported data.We will provide a view on how impactful we judge StrongMinds to be.What we will publishFrom March to July 2023, SoGive plans to publish a series of analyses pertaining to mental health. The content covered will includeMethodological notes on using existing academic literature, which quantifies depression interventions in terms of standardised mean differences, numbers needed to treat, remission rates and relapse rates; as well as the "standard deviation - years of depression averted" framework used by Happier Lives Institute.Broad, shallow reviews of academic and EA literature pertaining to the question of what the effect of psychotherapy is, as well as how this intersects with various factors such as number of sessions, demographics, and types of therapy.We will focus specifically on how the effect decays after therapy, and publish a separate report on this.Deep, narrow reviews of the RCTs and meta-analyses that are most closely pertaining to the StrongMind's context.Moral weights frameworks, explained in a manner which will allow a user to map dry numbers such as effect sizes to more visceral subjective feelings, so as to better apply their moral intuition to funding decisions.Cost-effective analyses which combine academic data and direct evidence from StrongMinds to arrive at our best estimate at what a donation to StrongMinds does.We hope these will empower others to check our work, do their own analyses of the topic, and take the work further.How will this enable higher impact donations?In the EA Survey conducted by Rethink Priorities, 60% of EA community members surveyed were in favour of giving "significant resources'' to mental health interventions, with 24% of those believing it should be a "top priority" or "near top priority" and 4% selecting it as their "top cause". Although other cause areas performed more favourably in the survey, this still appears to be a moderately high level of interest in mental health.Some EA energy has now gone into this area - for example, Charity Entrepreneurship incubated Canopie, Mental Health Funder's Circle, and played a role in incubating Happier Lives Institute. They additionally launched Kaya Guides and Vina Plena last year. We also had a talk from Friendship Bench at last year's EA Global.Our analysis will focus on StrongMinds. We chose StrongMinds because we know the organisation well. SoGive’s founder first had a conversation with StrongMinds in 2015 (thinking of his own donations) having seen a press article about them and having considered them a potentially high impact charity. Since then, several other EA orgs have been engaging with StrongMinds. Evaluations of StrongMinds specifically have now been published by both Founders Pledge and Happier Lives Institute, and Str...