About MH-CLD

Details

The Mental Health Client-Level Data (MH-CLD) and the Mental Health Treatment Episode Data Set (MH-TEDS) systems provide information on demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, clinical attributes (including mental health diagnoses and substance use), and National Outcome Measures (NOMs).

Where Do the Data Come From? 

Providers and facilities funded or operated by SMHAs report their data to their SMHA. SMHAs are responsible for reporting MH-CLD/MH-TEDS data to SAMHSA.

Data Limitations  

The data limitations include the following: 

• MH-CLD represents clients receiving publicly funded mental health and support services.
• The scope of providers and facilities reporting data varies across states.
• The mental health diagnoses in the dataset may not represent all diagnoses for individuals who are served. Some individuals have no valid mental health diagnosis reported. If the missing diagnosis is not randomly distributed across providers and/or facilities, estimated prevalence rates of mental health diseases may be biased.
• National outcome measures are reported by states based on state definitions as per block grant statute.

Confidentiality Protection 

Several measures are taken to protect the confidentiality of all records.

Disclosure analysis is used to identify records that have unique combinations of key (mostly) demographic variables that could link a record to an individual.

The original location of these records in MH-CLD is changed. If this is not sufficient to satisfy confidentiality standards, further recoding is done on other key variables. The recoding of variables including location is kept minimal, leaving nearly all the data intact. The analysis of the public-use file should not be affected.