Table 1:
Characteristics of included reviews with mental health outcomes (n = 8)
| Lead author (year) | Review objective | Population/setting | Eligible interventions | Eligible study designs | Studies (n), total, eligible | MH outcome | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anxiety | Depression | Self-harm | Suicide | ||||||
| Alcohol (n = 6) | |||||||||
| Roodbeen et al. (2021) | ‘to present a broad spectrum of intended as well as unintended units of information derived from the literature relative to the impact of a raise in the minimum legal drinking age on primary & secondary societal harm & violence’ | NS/NS | Raising minimum legal drinking age | NS | 91, 4 | — | — | — | Yes |
| Kolves (2020) | ‘to conduct a systematic literature review of the impact of alcohol policies at the population level on suicidal behavior & ideation’ | NS/NS | Availability, pricing policies | Ecological-level studies | 19, 11 | — | — | — | Yes |
| Muhunthan (2017) | ‘to investigate how Indigenous communities use public health law mechanisms to control alcohol & prevent its misuse & to what extent controls are effective in achieving improvements in health & social outcomes’ | Indigenous communities/NS | Community-led alcohol control policy models | Quantitative study designs | 18, 4 | — | — | Yes | Yes |
| Nepal (2020) | ‘to assess the effects of extensions & restrictions in trading hours of on- & off-license alcohol outlets’ | NS/NS | Alcohol trading hours | Randomized/non-randomized with control site; controlled before-and-after studies, interrupted timeseries | 22, 1 | Yes* | |||
| *Alcohol-related hospital admissions either for mental health and behavioural disorders/toxic effect of alcohol | |||||||||
| Nelson (2016) | ‘To summarize before-after effects of important price–tax changes on alcohol-related harms, & to compare these outcomes across countries in order to generalize about effects of important changes in alcohol prices on measures of harmful health outcomes for various subpopulations’ | NS/nine countries | Alcohol taxes, prices | Natural experiments | 45, 1 | — | — | — | Yes |
| Hahn et al. (2012) | ‘To evaluate the effects of the privatization of alcohol retail sales on excessive alcohol consumption & related harms’ | NS/NS | Monopolization of retail sales | NS | 14, 1 | — | — | — | Yes |
| Pesticides (n = 2) | |||||||||
| Gunnell (2017) | ‘To review the evidence of the effectiveness of pesticide regulation in reducing the incidence of pesticide suicides & overall suicides’ | NS/NS | Bans, sales restrictions | Natural experiments and controlled intervention (randomized and non-randomized) | 27, 27 | — | — | — | Yes |
| Reifels (2019) | ‘To identify effective community based suicide prevention approaches that involve restricting access to pesticides’ | NS/NS | Community-based suicide prevention approaches that involve restricting access to pesticides | Before-and-after, time-series analyses, quasi-experimental studies or RCTs | 5, 2 | — | — | — | Yes |
NS: not specified; RCTs: randomized controlled trials.