Women’s Behavioral Health: A Public Health Perspective

This book examines women's behavioral health (defined as alcohol, drug use, and mental health) problems from a population or public health perspective. It provides the current state of knowledge for women’s behavioral health and examines the need for behavioral health services and implications for policy. It also reviews major issues in the organization, financing, and provision of women’s behavioral health services.

Global and national studies show that women are nearly twice as likely as men to have selected mental disorders. There also has been increasing attention to the social, behavioral, institutional, and economic determinants of health that result in service inequities for women in the United States compared to women in other countries. This textbook highlights mental and substance use disorders of particular concern to women, emphasizes services research issues in women’s behavioral health, incorporates the social determinants of health, and provides a discussion of these critical issues from an interprofessional and interdisciplinary public health perspective. It also presents an overview of the epidemiology of mental and substance use disorders across the lifespan of women and service delivery issues from a population and system-level perspective. 

Applied services research chapters comprise the book's 14 chapter contributions that are organized into three parts:

• Part I. Framing Women’s Behavioral Health;
• Part II. Selected At-Risk Populations; and
• Part III. Services Delivery issues.

Women's Behavioral Health: A Public Health Perspective is a textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in many academic disciplines, including the social and behavioral sciences, public health, women’s studies, medical anthropology, and medical sociology. It also is useful for postdoctoral students in public health, population health, and the health professions. This volume can serve as a reference book for academicians and researchers in community and social psychology, community health, community nursing, community and preventive medicine, and public health; practitioners and policymakers at various levels of government; and behavioral health professionals at mental health and substance use programs in various national and global healthcare organizations.

Ardis Hanson, PhD, MLIS, AHIP is the Assistant Director of Research and Education at the University of South Florida (USF) Health Libraries and holds affiliate faculty positions in the USF College of Public Health and in the Department of Child and Family Studies at the USF College of Behavioral & Community Sciences. She is a Co-Investigator for the National Institute on Drug Abuse grant USF Institute for Translational Research in Adolescent Substance Use. Dr. Hanson has over 30 years of experience as a research librarian and has published extensively in the research areas including behavioral health services, health and behavioral health policy, and health services research. Her research focus also includes language and social interaction; how language is used in everyday practice to negotiate claims and identities, particularly in how behavioral health policy is created and developed.

Bruce Lubotsky Levin, DrPH, MPH is an Associate Professor in the Department of Child & Family Studies at the University of South Florida (USF) College of Behavioral & Community Sciences. He is also an Associate Professor & Head of the Behavioral Health Concentration (BHC) at the USF College of Public Health. He is Co-Principal Investigator and Director of Curriculum at the USF Institute for Translational Research in Adolescent Substance Use. This grant has been refunded for a third consecutive 5-year period by the National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse. Dr. Levin also currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Behavioral Health Services & Research (JBHS&R), a quarterly scholarly journal that publishes articles on the organization, financing, delivery, dissemination and implementation, and outcomes of behavioral health (including alcohol, drug use, and mental health) services. The JBHS&R is the official publication of the National Council for Mental Wellbeing and is published by Springer Nature. He is Senior Editor of numerous textbooks and textbook chapters, including: Foundations of Behavioral Health (Springer, 2020); Introduction to Public Health in Pharmacy, Second Edition (Oxford University Press, 2018); and Mental Health Services: A Public Health Perspective, 3rd Edition (Oxford University Press, 2010). He is co-author (with Ardis Hanson) of Mental Health Informatics (Oxford University Press, 2013).