Behavioral and Mental Health

Behavioral health covers mental illness, substance use disorders and the psychological side of physical illness. It is one of the largest sources of disability in every country, and it is one of the worst-served parts of healthcare. Demand is high, supply is short, payment is low, and many clinicians do not take insurance. Treatment depends on a relationship that lasts weeks or months, rather than on a procedure. Those facts made behavioral health the biggest single theme of the 2020–22 digital health boom, and its clearest bust: therapy marketplaces, employer mental-health benefits and tele-psychiatry start-ups raised billions, and several then ran into regulators, falling consumer demand or their own unit economics. This section explains the care continuum and who pays for it, why therapists drop out of insurance networks, what parity law does and does not do, how substance-use treatment is organized and financed, the business models of digital mental health, the 2020–23 boom and bust, and how an expert reads the space.