Evidence for Mental Health Occupational Therapy

This article reports on the evidence for mental health occupationaltherapy in peer-reviewed journals from 2000 to 2013. Descriptive and inductive methodswere used to address this question, with evidence from CINAHL, OTDBase, PSYCInfo,SCOPUS, and Google Scholar® included. Many articles (n = 1,747) were found that met theinclusion and exclusion criteria. A total of 47 different methods were used to developevidence for mental health occupational therapy, and evidence appeared in 300 separatepeer-reviewed journals. It takes on average 7 months for an article to progress fromsubmission to acceptance, and a further 7 months to progress from acceptance topublication. More than 95% of articles published between 2000 and 2002 were cited atleast once in the following decade, and around 70% of these citations were recorded innon-occupational therapy journals. The current evidence base for mental healthoccupational therapy is both substantial and diverse