The useful starting point is not whether $7.6 million sounds large. It is what had to happen, legally and administratively, before that number could be published as a lobbying total.
Singh et al., writing in JAMA Psychiatry, reported that lobbying by psychiatry and psychology interests increased 29.3% to $7.6 million in 2024, using OpenSecrets data to identify federal lobbying expenditures associated with psychiatry and psychology search terms.[1] The figure is concrete enough to travel quickly through policy discussions. One week after publication, it is already the kind of number a board member, partner, or legislative staffer can repeat.
But the more legally important sentence in the study is the authors’ caution that “no standardization exists for lobbying report specificity.”[1] That is not a minor methodological footnote. It identifies the point where a clean empirical claim meets the Lobbying Disclosure Act reporting system that produced the underlying records.
The defensible reading is straightforward: the $7.6 million figure is a documented federal reporting total within a constrained disclosure framework. It is not the outer boundary of psychiatry’s political influence, and it is not a precise measurement of every dollar spent to influence mental health policy.
The path from advocacy activity to a published spending figure
The public number passes through several filters before it reaches a journal table or a trade press summary. First, an organization or lobbying firm must engage in activity that falls within the LDA’s coverage. Second, the activity must trigger registration and reporting obligations. Third, the filer must estimate and categorize the relevant lobbying expenses. Fourth, those filings become available for aggregation by a data provider such as OpenSecrets. Finally, researchers define search terms, categories, and inclusion rules that convert those aggregated filings into a study dataset.
Each step is lawful and useful. Each step also narrows the field. The LDA does not collect all policy advocacy, and OpenSecrets cannot aggregate records that were never required to be filed in the first place.
| Stage | What becomes visible | What may be lost or blurred |
|---|---|---|
| Advocacy activity | Federal lobbying activity that falls within the LDA framework | State lobbying, grassroots activity, public communications, and activity outside federal LDA definitions |
| Registration and reporting | Activity by covered registrants that meets statutory and threshold requirements | Activity below thresholds or structured outside reportable categories |
| Expense reporting | Self-reported lobbying income or expenses in required filings | Exact dollar amounts, because reporting uses estimates and rounding |
| Aggregation | Searchable totals assembled from public filings | Granular issue distinctions when filings are broad or inconsistently specific |
| Research publication | A reproducible study result based on the researchers’ data choices | Adjacent advocacy not captured by the study’s terms, categories, or source data |
The LDA creates the record, not merely the disclosure label
The Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 is the infrastructure behind the federal lobbying records at issue here. It defines covered lobbying contacts and lobbying activities, requires certain lobbyist registrations, and requires periodic reports from registrants.[2] That statutory machinery matters because the public dataset is not a neutral census of influence. It is the output of a legal reporting regime.
For health law attorneys and compliance officers, the distinction is practical. A client may ask whether the JAMA Psychiatry number shows “how much psychiatry spent on lobbying.” The safer answer is narrower: it shows the amount identified in a peer-reviewed analysis of federal lobbying data available through OpenSecrets for psychiatry and psychology-related categories and search terms.[1] That distinction can sound fussy until someone uses the figure in a board memo, grant narrative, legislative testimony, or risk assessment.
A reported lobbying total is not improved by treating its legal constraints as inconveniences. The constraints are part of what the number means.
Thresholds decide whether activity enters the federal dataset at all
The first undercounting problem is not rounding. It is entry. LDA registration obligations depend in part on monetary thresholds, and those thresholds determine whether some activity ever appears in the federal disclosure system.
As adjusted in January 2025, the registration threshold for organizations employing in-house lobbyists increased from $14,000 to $16,000 in lobbying expenses per quarter, according to Inside Political Law’s summary of the LDA threshold adjustment.[3] That threshold is not a mere technicality. If an organization’s federal lobbying activity remains below the applicable threshold, its activity may be real for policy purposes but absent from the public federal lobbying dataset.
That matters especially in mental health advocacy, where the relevant universe may include professional societies, patient advocacy organizations, research entities, hospital systems, universities, coalitions, and broader healthcare groups. Some may lobby directly on psychiatry-adjacent issues. Some may support mental health policy through broader healthcare lobbying. Some may remain below federal registration thresholds in a given quarter. The public figure cannot reveal what never crossed the reporting gate.
The threshold point also cautions against a common comparative mistake. A year-over-year increase in reported spending may reflect more reportable activity, better categorization, changes in organizational behavior, or a combination of those factors. The Singh et al. finding supports a reported increase to $7.6 million in 2024; it does not by itself prove the full amount of underlying mental health advocacy or identify every cause of the increase.[1]
Rounding and self-estimation make the numbers less exact than they look
Even after activity enters the LDA system, the reported dollar amounts should not be read as ledger-level precision. The LDA requires reporting of lobbying income or expenses, but it permits estimates rather than exact accounting in the way many readers might assume from a published total.[2]
The statutory reporting structure provides that when total lobbying income or expenses exceed $10,000, amounts are reported rounded to the nearest $20,000.[2] A later aggregate total assembled from those filings therefore inherits approximation from the underlying reports. The problem is not that the number is useless. The problem is that the number has already been smoothed before a researcher or journalist ever sees it.
Consider a hypothetical filing, not a real psychiatry filing: if a covered organization estimates reportable federal lobbying expenses above the reporting floor, the public report may disclose a rounded amount rather than the exact internal cost allocation. When many such filings are aggregated, the final total can look exact because it has a dollar sign and a decimal point. The legal source records are not that exact.
This is why a legal memo should avoid phrasing such as “psychiatry spent exactly $7.6 million lobbying in 2024.” The supported formulation is closer to: “A JAMA Psychiatry study using OpenSecrets federal lobbying data identified $7.6 million in reported psychiatry and psychology lobbying expenditures in 2024.” That sentence is longer because it preserves the chain of custody.
Issue specificity is the quiet weakness in the dataset
The Singh et al. authors’ warning about the absence of standardization for lobbying report specificity deserves more attention than the headline increase.[1] LDA filings may identify broad issue areas, but the degree of detail can vary. One filer may describe an issue with enough specificity to make a psychiatry connection apparent. Another may report under a broader healthcare, Medicare, Medicaid, workforce, research, or insurance category even when mental health policy is part of the work.
For the legal reader, this is not just a taxonomy problem. It affects what can be responsibly inferred. If mental health advocacy is embedded in a broader healthcare campaign, a psychiatry-focused search strategy may miss it. If a professional organization files broadly, a category-based aggregation may not isolate psychiatry-specific work. If a coalition engages on behavioral health parity, reimbursement, telehealth, prescribing, workforce, or research funding, the way that activity appears in federal data may depend on filing language as much as substantive policy content.
That does not make the JAMA Psychiatry study unreliable. It means the study is measuring what the federal filings and the researchers’ categorization choices allow it to measure. A dataset built from nonstandard descriptions can support a careful trend analysis, but it should not be mistaken for a full map of the advocacy ecosystem.
The broader physician lobbying comparison is useful, but limited
The psychiatry and psychology increase also stands out because it appears against a broader physician professional organization backdrop. Bouvette et al., in a 10-year comparative analysis of medical and surgical specialty lobbying by physician professional organizations, used OpenSecrets data to evaluate lobbying trends across specialties and reported a broader landscape in which psychiatry’s direction was notable rather than routine.[4]
That comparison helps situate the 2024 psychiatry figure, but it should not carry more weight than it can bear. Bouvette et al. examined physician professional organizations, while the Singh et al. psychiatry and psychology analysis used its own study design and search approach.[1][4] The comparison is context, not a merged dataset.
Trade press coverage understandably emphasized that psychiatrists and psychologists were spending more while other healthcare providers were not described in the same way.[5] That is a fair news hook. It is not a substitute for asking how LDA filing thresholds, rounding, and issue-code specificity shaped the underlying data before the comparison was made.
Enforcement limits affect confidence in completeness, not usefulness
The LDA contains compliance obligations and enforcement provisions, but public lobbying data should not be treated as if every underlying advocacy decision has been independently audited before publication.[2] The system relies heavily on covered entities identifying reportable activity, registering when required, estimating expenses, and filing reports with legally sufficient descriptions.
That reliance does not justify a dramatic assumption that the psychiatry number is wrong. It does justify caution about completeness. A disclosure regime can be valuable and still undercount the activity it is designed to illuminate. Indeed, that is the normal tension in lobbying transparency: the public record is indispensable precisely because it is incomplete in legally identifiable ways.
How to use the $7.6 million figure in legal and compliance work
For a compliance officer or health law attorney, the question is not whether to cite the JAMA Psychiatry number. It is how to cite it without letting the number do more work than the source can support.
- Use source-specific language: describe the figure as reported federal lobbying spending identified through OpenSecrets-based research, not as total psychiatry political spending.
- Preserve the time period: the cited figure concerns 2024 spending as reported in the Singh et al. analysis.
- Separate adoption from effect: increased lobbying expenditures do not, by themselves, prove policy success or legislative causation.
- Flag the LDA filters: thresholds, rounded reporting, self-estimation, and nonstandard issue specificity all affect what appears in the dataset.
- Avoid category overreach: psychiatry and psychology search terms may not capture all mental-health-related lobbying, particularly when broader healthcare entities file under general issue areas.
- Exclude state lobbying from the federal claim unless a separate state-law dataset is analyzed.
The last point is particularly important. Both the psychiatry-focused claim and the broader physician lobbying comparisons rest on federal lobbying data. State lobbying operates under separate disclosure regimes, with requirements that vary by jurisdiction. Mental health policy is often contested at the state level, including scope-of-practice rules, Medicaid coverage, involuntary treatment standards, parity enforcement, telehealth, school-based services, licensing, and workforce programs. A federal LDA number does not capture that terrain.
A careful board memo might therefore say: “Singh et al. reported that psychiatry and psychology lobbying identified in OpenSecrets federal data rose 29.3% to $7.6 million in 2024, but the figure should be read as a reported federal minimum because LDA thresholds, rounded self-reported expenses, nonstandard issue specificity, and the exclusion of state lobbying limit completeness.” That formulation is less headline-ready. It is also much harder to misuse.
The disciplined reading rule
The Singh et al. study is useful because it gives legal and policy readers a timely, peer-reviewed view of reported federal lobbying activity in psychiatry and psychology.[1] Its value increases, rather than decreases, when the LDA framework is kept in view.
The responsible legal use of the $7.6 million figure is as a documented minimum within a constrained federal reporting framework. It excludes state lobbying. It may miss mental-health advocacy embedded in broader healthcare filings. It reflects thresholds, rounded reporting, self-estimation, and variable issue specificity. It is a floor, not the perimeter.
References
- Lobbying Trends in Psychiatry and Psychology, JAMA Psychiatry, July 15, 2026.
- Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, lobbyingdisclosure.house.gov.
- LDA’s Registration Thresholds Increase for Lobbyist Employers and Lobbying Firms, Inside Political Law, March 10, 2025.
- A 10-year comparative analysis of medical and surgical specialty lobbying by physician professional organizations, PMC, 2025.
- Psychiatrists, psychologists spending more than other healthcare providers to lobby policymakers, HealthExec.
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