A public institute for psychological health
Psychological health belongs to every person.
NOOS maps how minds, groups, and cultures actually move — then turns that knowledge into programs, careful companions, and tools that employers can use without humiliating people.
Theme of the year · 2026
Most of the treatment gap for depression, anxiety and substance use opens before people seek help
In six published care cascades, 64–82% of the gap in adequate care opens before people seek help.
In six published care cascades for depression, anxiety and substance use, 64% to 82% of people without minimally adequate care had not sought help (51% to 82% if, in the two cascades from a pooled model of 149 studies, contact with any service, not only health services, counts). These are 12-month snapshots recalculated from published data; they do not show why people did not seek help or whether care was available to them.
Indicators, not a world mood
We do not rank countries by how mentally ill they are: no reliable data can support such a number. Instead we are building a few indicators — loneliness, for example — each to carry its method, its version and its limits. None has been measured yet.
- Will not ship
World psychological temperature
We will not publish this
A single ranking of countries by ‘how sick the minds are’ would repeat the mistake of Google Flu Trends, which predicted flu from search queries and overshot badly. Search volume and online mood change day to day; they do not count people.
We leave this slot empty on purpose. Anyone can publish a mood score. We refuse the one that would make us famous for a year and wrong forever.
- Briefing
Loneliness as air quality
Public number, not a flaw
The first indicator we are building. We are assembling a country table from surveys — not from hashtags — with a method; nothing has been measured yet, and it gets a version number only once it is.
Not a mandate that introversion is a disease, or that everyone should join a club.
- On the desk
The page at 1 a.m.
Help panel or a thread
Country × crisis query × what the engine puts on the page: help, forum, method, ads. That is a map a search company can change. It is not ‘this nation got sadder’.
We do not publish methods that make harm easier to find. We do not treat a trend line as incidence.
- Briefing
The loud-day headline
Widens or narrows a cluster
After a high-profile death the press is a public-health instrument. The gauge is whether the sentence carried a help link and refused the method — not how many times we were tagged.
Journalism does not cause suicide one-to-one. Silence is not the only alternative to spectacle.
Three rooms, one mission
Observatory
Worldwide dynamics, written as conclusions a journalist can quote and a city can use.
Open →
Programs & companions
Alcohol, violence, isolation, shock. Companions: a demo you can try in the browser. Circles: not open yet.
Open →
Workplace diagnostics
The commercial floor. Hiring tools, sold only once validated, with a published ethics file.
Open →
Mission
Find out what makes people psychologically healthier — and test it
Psychological health belongs to every person, not a market segment. NOOS studies it in public, says plainly what each finding does not show, and plans the help that should follow. Much of that help does not exist yet; below, plans are marked as plans.
How we plan to help →Studies and scientific conclusions
Read- 01NHS Talking Therapies waiting times: 20–25% who reach a second appointment wait over 90 days for itThere are two waits in NHS Talking Therapies: from referral to the first appointment, which the national standard counts, and from the first appointment to the second, which it does not. England's standard for NHS Talking Therapies counts the wait from referral to the first appointment, which NHS England's own manual describes as "primarily assessment", and only for people who go on to finish a course. Services meet it comfortably: about 9 in 10 who finish a course are seen within 6 weeks, against a target of 75%. But NHS England's monthly data show that of people who had a second appointment, 20–25% had waited more than 90 days after the first one (November 2022 to April 2025; 25.4% in April 2025), and more than half had waited over four weeks. The standard is met; the wait after the first appointment is not part of it.
- 02Alcohol use disorder: in Australia, an estimated 1 in 4 will ever seek help, the fewest of any disorder in the surveyIn the Australian national survey of 2020–22, an estimated 25% of people with alcohol use disorder will ever make contact with help for it, against 94% of people with major depressive disorder and 36% with drug use disorders; alcohol use disorder was the lowest of all disorders in the survey (Birrell 2025). A meta-analysis of 32 studies found that about one in six people with alcohol use disorder receive any treatment (17.3%; Mekonen 2021), and in surveys from 25 countries it was the only disorder linked to lower odds of treatment in several kinds of care (Evans-Lacko 2018). Those who do make contact are not the ones who wait longest: the median delay was 10 years for alcohol use disorder and 11 for any anxiety disorder (Birrell 2025). The lifetime figures are projections from people's own recall, and "treatment" usually means any contact, not adequate care.
- 03Bipolar disorder: 6 to 9 years to diagnosis or treatment, on average across studiesTwo meta-analyses put the average time from the first mood episode to diagnosis or treatment of bipolar disorder at 9.10 years (Keramatian 2025, 22 studies, 5,942 people) and 5.8 years (Dagani 2017, 51 samples, 9,415 patients). Both are averages across studies, not across people, and the studies define the start and the end of the delay differently. First contact with help tends to come earlier than the right diagnosis: in a review of 59 studies the median delay in seeking help was 3.5 years and the median diagnostic delay 6.7 years (Scott 2022), but these medians come from different sets of studies. In Hungary, the delay from first presentation to a specialist mental health service to a bipolar diagnosis averaged 6.46 years (Lublóy 2020), which the authors call a lower-bound estimate.
Loud findings, careful claims
When a result is strong enough to change how a city or a newsroom acts, we publish a full briefing an editor or a ministry can cite: sources, method, what it does not prove, and a sentence that can be quoted without distorting the science.
Press room