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Research

Studies and scientific conclusions

We join large, mixed sources until a pattern holds. Then we write the briefing other people want to quote — method they can rerun, a table, a limit they must keep. That is how an institute becomes a source, not a feed.

How briefings are made: AI assistants search for sources, draft the text and check the numbers against the original sources; the founder of NOOS Institute decides what is published and answers for it. How we work

Find the pattern. Write the piece they cite.

Yes. The observatory exists to find regularities in large, mixed sources and to write the piece a journalist, a ministry, or another lab wants to cite with a link. Authority is that citation — with the limit still attached — not a mood and not a follower count.

What will not make us a source

English is the source. Russian is a door.

What we will not twin

Access to carePublished
NHS Talking Therapies waiting times: 20–25% who reach a second appointment wait over 90 days for it
There 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.
2026 · England
Access to carePublished
Alcohol use disorder: in Australia, an estimated 1 in 4 will ever seek help, the fewest of any disorder in the survey
In 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.
2026 · Australia; United States; World Mental Health surveys from 15 to 26 countries; reviews of the Americas and of 37 studies; a meta-analysis of 32 studies
Access to carePublished
Bipolar disorder: 6 to 9 years to diagnosis or treatment, on average across studies
Two 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.
2026 · Meta-analyses of studies from many countries; US; Hungary; Australia (Sydney); Italy (Turin)
Access to carePublished
Most of the treatment gap for depression, anxiety and substance use opens before people seek help
A care cascade follows people who had a condition in the past year through the steps of care: seeking help, then receiving minimally adequate care. We recalculated six published cascades for depression, anxiety disorders and substance use disorders — from the World Mental Health surveys, a pooled model of 149 studies and a national survey of Canada — and in each, most people without minimally adequate care had not sought help: 64% to 82% of the gap (51% to 82% if any service, not only health services, counts as first contact in the pooled model of 149 studies). Among those who did seek help, from 29% to 85% still did not receive minimally adequate care, depending on the country and the definition. These are 12-month snapshots, survey-based (in the pooled model, pooled from studies), and they measure care received against the authors’ thresholds, not recovery.
2026 · Multi-country surveys and models, Canada
Access to carePublished
11 years from symptoms to help? Among those who sought it, it differs by disorder: anxiety 11, mood 3 (Australia, 2020–22)
The often-quoted "11 years" from first symptoms to treatment is a US median for all disorders together, from 1990–92, among people who eventually sought help; it is not one number for every disorder. In Australia (2020–2022) and Argentina's large cities (2015), among people who eventually sought help, the median time from the start of an anxiety disorder to the first contact with a professional was several times longer than for mood disorders: 11 years vs 3 and 21 vs 8. In the older US survey (2001–2003) the difference was smaller for some disorders: generalized anxiety disorder 9 years, major depressive episode 8. People with substance use disorders waited comparably long, 8 and 16 years in the Australian and Argentine surveys. These medians count only people who eventually sought help, and an earlier start of the disorder itself goes with longer delay; no study we found separates age of onset from the difference between disorder classes. Singapore (2016–2018) shows the opposite, 1 year vs 5, but only 137 people in that survey had sought help.
2026 · Australia; Argentina (large cities); US; Singapore; Netherlands; Canada (military); 15-country World Mental Health surveys
Access to carePublished
Depression and anxiety: years to first help, and we found no tested way to shorten it
In Australia's national survey of 2020–22, people who eventually sought help from a doctor or other professional had waited a median of 3 years after major depressive disorder began and 11 years after an anxiety disorder began (Birrell 2025). We found no controlled study in which the time from the start of depression or anxiety to first help was the outcome being measured. Two reviews of reviews, covering 2015–2025, found such evidence only for psychosis (Lee 2026, Adu 2026). Programmes that encourage people to seek help change attitudes and intentions; one meta-analysis found that they increase actual help-seeking among people with or at risk of mental health problems, but not among children, adolescents or the general public (Xu 2018); a review on depression, anxiety and distress found no effect on actually seeking help (Gulliver 2012), and a meta-analysis on depressive symptoms found, in the authors' reading of a borderline result, none (Ni 2025). "Not found" means not found in two literature databases and two reviews of reviews; it does not prove that no such study exists, or that the delay cannot be shortened.
2026 · Australia; United States; Europe; reviews of studies from many countries
Access to carePublished
Duration of untreated psychosis (DUP): mean 61 weeks, median 12, among people who reached care
Among people who reached a service with a first episode of psychosis, the mean duration of untreated psychosis (DUP, the time from first signs of psychosis to treatment) is 2.6 to 6.4 times the median in the studies we compared: 61.4 weeks against 12.0 across 3,339 people from 16 studies (Boonstra 2012). A few very long waits pull the mean up. The wait is longer with gradual onset of the illness (in England a median of 32 weeks against 3 with acute onset), but onset is dated from recall, and gradual onset is harder to date. The wait does not differ by sex (in schizophrenia), pooled estimates (estimates combining several studies) show no difference by ethnic group, and on age the studies disagree: three found a longer wait when the illness began earlier, one (Denmark, ages 15–25 only) when it began later, and the samples differ. In one US study of 34 non-academic community clinics (RAISE-ETP, 404 people aged 15–40), a long wait was the norm: a median of 74 weeks.
2026 · England (London, Nottingham); Hong Kong; Japan; India; US; Denmark; Norway; Mexico; multi-country summaries
Access to carePublished
Duration of untreated psychosis: early intervention rarely shortens it, though it helps those who reach it
Early intervention services for a first episode of psychosis did better than usual care on all 13 outcomes at the end of treatment in 10 randomised trials with 2,176 people (Correll 2018). But in reviews of controlled studies, early detection or early intervention strategies, counted together, shortened the duration of untreated psychosis (DUP, the time from first signs to treatment) only slightly (g = 0.168, 14 cohorts, 2,938 people; Salazar de Pablo 2024) or not measurably (g = −0.12, interval includes zero; in that review a negative g means a shorter delay; Oliver 2018). Only one programme with a comparison group clearly did: Norway's TIPS. In the area with a continuous public campaign together with early detection teams, the median was 5 weeks against 16 in comparison areas; after the campaign stopped it went back to 15 weeks, though the teams kept working. This is one programme in one country, and the areas were not chosen at random.
2026 · Norway; England (Birmingham, London); US (New Haven, Boston); Hong Kong; Montreal; multi-country reviews
AddictionBriefing
Does drinking spread through social networks, and do treatments that change a person's network help?
In a US study that followed 12,067 people from 1971 to 2003, drinkers and non-drinkers formed clusters that reached up to three degrees of separation. The same kind of method also finds that acne, headaches and height "spread", so clustering alone does not prove that drinking passes from person to person. In trials, treatments that build support for not drinking did better than case management in one US trial, and did not differ significantly from motivational therapy in a large UK trial. A Cochrane review found that manualized AA and twelve-step facilitation led to more continuous abstinence at 12 months than other treatments in two trials (1,936 people); the high certainty applies only to continuous abstinence.
2026 · United States; United Kingdom; multi-country review
Violence and traumaBriefing
What is known about untreated trauma and violence in cities?
Published studies show that trauma is common among patients of an urban public hospital, that interpersonal violence carries the highest risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and that only 48.8% of people with PTSD in the past year sought any treatment. Childhood abuse and adverse experiences are linked to later violence, but most abused children did not become violent. Some violence-prevention programmes have reduced arrests or crime, mostly in the US and over short periods. None of this proves that untreated trauma causes violence in cities.
2026 · Mostly United States; multi-country surveys; Liberia
LonelinessBriefing
How is loneliness measured as a public-health number?
Loneliness is counted with one direct question or a short scale (most often three UCLA items or six De Jong Gierveld items), and for the three-item scale there is no agreed score that marks a person as lonely. Surveys differ in wording, answer options and time period, and different sources for the same country give systematically different shares.
2026 · Worldwide, national surveys
IsolationPublished
Weak social ties — few contacts or loneliness — are linked to earlier death
Two large reviews of other researchers’ studies find that people with weaker social ties are more likely to die during follow-up. The reviews do not prove that isolation causes death. This page is a reading of those papers, not a NOOS study.
2026 · Mostly Europe and North America, some Asia and Australia
WorkPublished
Are personality tests valid for hiring? What the evidence shows
Some personality tests predict job performance, but weakly. In a 2022 re-analysis of meta-analyses, conscientiousness correlates about .19 with performance ratings, the other Big Five traits about .05–.10, while structured interviews reach .42. The code of ethics of the MBTI's owners says it must not be used to screen job applicants.
2026 · Mostly United States research and law
MediaBriefing
Can news reporting of suicide raise or lower suicide deaths?
A 2020 meta-analysis found that suicide risk rose by 13% after media reports of a celebrity's suicide, and deaths by the same method rose by 30% when the celebrity's method was reported. Stories of people coping with a crisis were linked to fewer suicides in one Austrian study and to a small drop in suicidal thoughts in trials among people vulnerable to suicide. All of these are associations from observational data or small effects on thoughts, not proof that reporting causes or prevents deaths. Whether media guidelines themselves reduce deaths cannot yet be said.
2026 · Multi-country studies; Austria
SearchBriefing
Do suicide-related internet searches track suicide deaths, and what do search pages show?
In one study across the USA, Germany, Austria and Switzerland taken together, links between suicide-related searches and suicide rates were about as common as chance would produce; this covers monthly national figures only. Studies of search pages found few help sites among results for searches about methods, and a helpline box that appeared unevenly; these are snapshots, and what people clicked was not measured.
2026 · USA, UK, Ireland, German-speaking Europe, Belgium
CaregivingPublished
Caregiver burden: what research knows and what it does not
Caregiver burden is the strain people report from caring for a family member over time. Large reviews find that caregivers report more depression and stress than non-caregivers, that the strain tracks the conditions of care, and that support programs improve mood more reliably than they reduce burden itself.
2026 · Mostly United States, plus international reviews
Addiction and familiesPublished
Families affected by addiction: what research knows and what it does not
Research describes a relative's addiction as a lasting source of stress for the family: shock, isolation and stigma, strain on health and relationships. One family-based approach, CRAFT, has been tested in trials. With it, about two in three reluctant relatives entered treatment. That was more often than with Al-Anon facilitation — counselling that encourages the family member to join Al-Anon groups — or with a planned family confrontation. The outcome is entering treatment, not recovery. Family members' own well-being improved about equally with each approach. Most of this evidence concerns alcohol and the United States.
2026 · Mostly United States, plus international reviews

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