Integrating Mental Health Services: A Multilevel Network Methodological Approach

Mental healthcare services must be seen through a social lens, where coordinated actions are crucial for developing holistic care plans that consider patients' broader social and environmental contexts. The mental health system operates across interdependent levels—clinical, community, organisational, and policy—each contributing to overall mental wellness. However, fostering synergies across these layers presents challenges, as healthcare professionals from diverse settings (community centres, hospitals, NGOs, and private foundations) often have different capabilities, priorities, and needs. These actors form a complex network of relationships, creating intricate governance structures within the sector. Understanding how these relationships operate and how to nurture partnerships between mental health services is essential for building an integrated care system.

Despite the clear social nature of the mental health system, the factors and best practices that sustain collaboration across different service providers and health professionals remain underexplored. Research on the multilevel collaborative processes—such as community initiatives, interventions, and resource sharing—between public and private entities has been sparse. Using past and current case studies, the present presentation discusses the theoretical and practical implications of applying a multilevel network perspective, rooted in social networks research, for analysing the multi-level patterns of interpersonal relationships within and across different healthcare professionals and their networking performance, with a view to also map patient’s larger social system to understand how comprehensively support people’s mental health.