The 8th Annual Thomas R. Ten Have Symposium on Statistics in Mental Health took place in New Haven, Connecticut, on May 31. It was hosted by Yale University.

Attendees were inspired by the keynote presentation given by Adam Chekroud, a neuroscientist and founder of Spring Health, Inc., who discussed the role of data science and biostatistics in advancing mental health care delivery. Chekroud highlighted challenges related to reproducibility and generalizability in psychiatry, demonstrating that data-driven machine-learning approaches can lead to poor prediction of treatment response, even when using seemingly rich high-dimensional data. After the talk, he and others noted that complementing clinical data with information about underlying mechanisms, such as neuroimaging and genomic data, might improve predictive performance.

Other invited presentations were given by Samrachana Adhikari from New York University, Kristin Linn from the University of Pennsylvania, Linda Valeri from Columbia University, and Chengan Du from Yale University. The presentations spanned topics in machine learning for prediction of rare outcomes, estimation of optimal dynamic treatment regimes, causal inference for multiple mediation analysis in schizophrenia trials, and factor analysis.

Throughout the day, several posters were presented by graduate students and post-docs motivated to improve mental health research and clinical decision-making from a variety of quantitative and clinical backgrounds. Dinner at the famous BAR restaurant in New Haven and lively discussion concluded the event.

Once again, the gathering of northeastern scientists, clinicians, and entrepreneurs devoted to alleviating the suffering that arises from psychiatric disorders inspired us to continue our work in mental health. As clinicians and policymakers are increasingly open to using complex machine-learning approaches to inform decision-making in mental health care, statisticians are essential to ensuring validity and correct interpretation of study findings.

This annual event was founded in 1999 by Thomas R. Ten Have and Eva Petkova as a forum for statisticians working in psychiatric research and, more generally, mental health research to discuss ideas about new statistical methodologies and challenges. Thomas Ten Have passed away in 2011. To honor his many statistical contributions to mental health research, the symposium was renamed the Thomas R. Ten Have Symposium on Statistics in Mental Health. The event is also sponsored by the ASA’s Mental Health Statistics Section every other year.