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POLICY POINTS: When communicating with state legislators, advocates for state behavioral health parity laws should emphasize that the laws do not increase insurance premiums. Legislators' opinions about the impacts of state behavioral health parity laws and the effectiveness of behavioral health treatment have more influence on support for the laws than do their political party affiliation or state‐level contextual factors. Reducing legislators' stigma toward people with mental illness could increase their support for state behavioral health parity laws. CONTEXT: Comprehensive state behavioral health parity legislation (C‐SBHPL) is an evidence‐based policy that improves access and adherence to behavioral health treatments. However, adoption of C‐SBHPL by state legislators is low. Little is known about how C‐SBHPL evidence might be most effectively disseminated to legislators or how legislators' fixed characteristics (eg, ideology), mutable characteristics (eg, beliefs about the policy's impact), and state‐level contextual factors might influence their support for behavioral health policies. The purpose of our study is (1) to describe the associations between legislators' fixed and mutable characteristics, state‐level contextual factors, and support for C‐SBHPL; and (2) to identify the mutable characteristics of legislators independently associated with C‐SBHPL support. METHODS: We conducted a multimodal (post mail, email, telephone) survey of US state legislators in 2017 (N = 475). The dependent variable was strong support for C‐SBHPL, and the independent variables included legislators' fixed and mutable characteristics and state‐level contextual factors. We conducted multivariable, multilevel (legislator, state) logistic regression. FINDINGS: Thirty‐nine percent of the legislators strongly supported C‐SBHPL. After adjustment, the strongest predictors of C‐SBHPL support were beliefs that C‐SBHPL increases access to behavioral health treatments (aOR = 5.85; 95% CI = 2.41, 14.20) and does not increase insurance ...

State mental health agencies (SMHAs) are integral to public behavioral health service systems. As such, senior-level officials within SMHAs are important targets for advocacy and dissemination of behavioral health research findings. Evidence-informed decision making in SMHAs can potentially be enhanced by developing summaries of behavioral health research (e.g., policy briefs) that reflect SMHA officials' information preferences, but knowledge about these preferences is lacking. An exploratory study was conducted with the aims of characterizing senior-level SMHA officials' preferences for behavioral health research and describing where they turn for this research when making policy decisions. A cross-sectional, web-based survey of senior-level SMHA officials (one per state) was conducted in March-May 2017 (n= 43, response rate=84%). The features of behavioral health research that SMHA officials identified as "very important" most frequently were research being relevant to state residents (93.0%), providing data on cost-effectiveness (86.0%) and budget impact (81.4%), and being presented concisely (81.0%). The primary sources that SMHA officials turned to for behavioral research when making policy decisions were professional organizations (79.1%), SMHA agency staff (60.5%), and university researchers (55.8%). Compared with state legislators' responses to the same survey questions, results suggest that senior-level SMHA officials and legislators have similar preferences for behavioral health research but turn to different sources for this research. Advocates and researchers who seek to promote evidence-informed decision making in SMHAs should consider developing policy briefs that are concise, provide state-level prevalence data about behavioral conditions, contain economic evaluation data, and should disseminate these materials to multiple sources.