Public-academic partnerships: a public-academic partnership to support a state mental health authority's strategic planning and policy decisions.

Mental health authorities across the country face numerous challenges in developing effective and practical strategies to adopt and sustain research-supported and stakeholder-endorsed mental health practices. This column describes how an academic center assists a mental health authority in making policy decisions by the use of advisory panels of multiple stakeholders, including members of the research community, advocacy organizations, service providers, and consumers. An advisory panel that focused on services involving family members for adults with serious mental health problems serves as a case example.