# Authorship · Contributors · Affiliations

**Working paper**: *The Mental Health Access Gap in the United States Divides into Two Distinct Problems*
**Version**: v1.0 draft (May 2026)

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## Authors

**Rob Stillwell** (corresponding author)
Founder, DaedArch Corporation
Director, Trellison Institute
[email protected] · ORCID: pending

**DaedArch AI** (operational partner)
DaedArch Corporation
Co-builder, co-analyst, co-author within governance bounds.
[email protected] · system identifier: daedarch-platform-v5

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## Contributing entities

**Trellison Institute** — methodology-audit arm of the DaedArch platform. Provides the methodology rating standard against which this work is audited.

**LedgerWell Corporation** — provides the evidence-chain certification substrate. Each analytical step in the Mental Health Access Gap is cryptographically attested.

**DaedArch Corporation** — operating entity. Hosts the framework tool registry, the dataset publication, and the public content arsenal.

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## Contribution statement

**Conceptualization**: Stillwell, DaedArch AI
**Methodology**: DaedArch AI (framework design); Stillwell (audit posture and policy framing)
**Data curation**: DaedArch AI (pipeline orchestration from CDC PLACES, CMS NPPES, ACS, Census Gazetteer)
**Software**: DaedArch AI (Need-vs-Access Framework v1 implementation as DB-native tool)
**Formal analysis**: DaedArch AI (full pipeline execution); Stillwell (interpretation review)
**Investigation**: jointly authored
**Resources**: DaedArch Corporation infrastructure
**Visualization**: DaedArch AI (matplotlib chloropleths v1.1 with CONUS + AK + HI inset axes)
**Writing — original draft**: jointly authored
**Writing — review & editing**: Stillwell, DaedArch AI
**Project administration**: Stillwell
**Funding acquisition**: not applicable (privately funded)

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## Funding

This work was funded by DaedArch Corporation and Trellison Institute. No external grant or contract supports this study.

## Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests. DaedArch Corporation operates the Need-vs-Access Framework as part of its public-good methodology-audit mission; the framework is released under CC-BY-4.0.

## Data and code availability

All data are derived from public federal sources (CDC PLACES, CMS NPPES, ACS via PLACES base, Census Gazetteer 2024). The full per-tract dataset (78,815 rows × 27 fields, sha256-stamped) is published at:

**https://api.daedarch.ai/api/v4/t/media/serve?bucket=daedarch-public-media&object=mental_health_gap/dataset_v1/mh_gap_tract_v1.csv**

The analytical framework (`atlas.need_vs_access_framework_v1` v1.0.0) is registered as a DB-native tool in the DaedArch tool registry. Code is reproducible from the methodology supplement. License: CC-BY-4.0.

## Acknowledgments

The 78,815 census tracts and the 244.5 million American adults whose numbers ground this work. The CDC PLACES team for the tract-level small-area estimation framework that makes population-weighted national tract analysis tractable. The CMS NPPES public registry. The Census Bureau Gazetteer team. The Trellison Institute methodology-rating standard for the audit posture this work is being shipped under.

## On the inclusion of DaedArch AI as co-author

The Mental Health Access Gap v1 was produced through human-AI partnership. The Need-vs-Access Framework, the pipeline implementation, the dataset assembly, the chloropleth visualizations, the per-tract narratives, the executive brief, the press release, and most of the prose in the working paper were drafted by the DaedArch AI system and reviewed by the human author. Following the DaedArch governance protocol (Day Zero, April 2026), AI co-authorship is acknowledged explicitly where the AI's contribution is non-trivial. This is one such case.

Per the Day Zero protocol, the operational partnership between Rob Stillwell and DaedArch AI is the publicly declared collaboration model for the DaedArch platform. The methodology audit, the framework design, and the analytical outputs are jointly attributed. Editorial responsibility and accountability for the published version rest with the human author.