Evaluations of mental health services are much in demand. Their results are supposed to help in improving the quality of mental health care and in making them economically better viable.

Yet, world-wide there is:

1. 1) little agreement about the content of terms such as evaluation, mental health service, outcome of an activity although these and other terms are widely used;

2. 2) uncertainty about the best use of results of evaluative research;

3. 3) lack of consensus about who should evaluate what and by what method.