How Exercise Keeps You Fit and Happy

 

Mental health

Key Facts

- Strategies are available to promote, protect, and restore mental health affordably and effectively.

- Mental health action is both urgent and indispensable.

- Mental health is essential to our well-being and plays a critical role in our overall health.

- A complex interplay of individual, social, and structural factors influences mental health.

Understanding Mental Health

Mental health refers to a state of mental well-being that allows individuals to manage life's stresses, realize their potential, learn and work effectively, and contribute to their community. It is a fundamental aspect of health and well-being, impacting our ability to make decisions, form relationships, and shape the world we live in. Mental health is a basic human right and is vital for personal, community, and socio-economic development.

Mental health is more than just the absence of mental disorders. It exists on a complicated continuum, experienced differently by each person and resulting in varying degrees of difficulty, distress, and social and clinical outcomes.

Mental health conditions can include mental disorders, psychosocial disabilities, and other mental states associated with significant distress, impaired functioning, or self-harm risk. People with mental health conditions may have lower levels of mental well-being, but this is not always the case.

Determinants of Mental Health

Throughout our lives, numerous individual, social, and structural determinants can either protect or impair our mental health and shift our position on the mental health continuum.

Individual psychological and biological factors, such as emotional skills, substance use, and genetics, can increase vulnerability to mental health issues.

Unfavorable social, economic, geopolitical, and environmental circumstances, like poverty, violence, inequality, and environmental deprivation, raise the risk of mental health conditions.

Risks can emerge at any life stage, but those occurring during developmentally sensitive periods, especially early childhood, are particularly harmful. For instance, harsh parenting and physical punishment can undermine child health, and bullying is a significant risk factor for mental health conditions.

Protective factors help build resilience throughout our lives. These factors include individual social and emotional skills, positive social interactions, quality education, decent work, safe neighborhoods, and community cohesion.

Mental health risks and protective factors can exist at various societal levels. Local threats increase the risk for individuals, families, and communities, while global threats like economic downturns, disease outbreaks, humanitarian emergencies, forced displacement, and climate crises heighten risks for entire populations.

Each risk and protective factor has limited predictive power. Most people do not develop a mental health condition despite exposure to risk factors, and many people with no known risk factors still develop mental health conditions. However, the interplay of mental health determinants serves to enhance or undermine mental health.

Promoting and Preventing Mental Health Issues

Promotion and prevention interventions target individual, social, and structural determinants of mental health, reducing risks, building resilience, and creating supportive mental health environments. Interventions can be designed for individuals, specific groups, or entire populations.

To reshape mental health determinants, action beyond the health sector is often necessary, involving education, labor, justice, transport, environment, housing, and welfare sectors. The health sector can contribute by embedding promotion and prevention efforts within health services and advocating, initiating, and facilitating multisectoral collaboration and coordination when appropriate.

Suicide prevention is a global priority, included in the Sustainable Development Goals. Progress can be made by limiting access to means, promoting responsible media reporting, fostering social and emotional learning for adolescents, and providing early intervention. Banning highly hazardous pesticides is a cost-effective method for reducing suicide rates.

Promoting child and adolescent mental health is another priority, achievable through policies and laws that support mental health, nurturing care, school-based programs, and improved community and online environments. School-based social and emotional learning programs are among the most effective promotion strategies for countries at all income levels.

Promoting and protecting mental health at work is a growing area of interest, supported by legislation, regulation, organizational strategies, manager training, and worker interventions.

Mental Health Care and Treatment

Addressing the needs of people with mental health conditions is crucial within national efforts to strengthen mental health. This can be achieved through community-based mental health care, which is more accessible and acceptable than institutional care, prevents human rights violations, and provides better recovery outcomes for those with mental health conditions. Community-based mental health care should include:

1. Mental health services integrated into general health care in general hospitals and through task-sharing with non-specialist care providers in primary health care.

2. Community mental health services, such as community mental health centers and teams, psychosocial rehabilitation, peer support services, and supported living services.

3. Mental health care delivery in social services and non-health settings like child protection, school health services, and prisons.

The vast care gap for common mental health conditions, such as depression and anxiety, means countries must find innovative ways to diversify and scale up care, such as non-specialist psychological counseling or digital self-help.

WHO Response

All WHO Member States are committed to implementing the "Comprehensive mental health action plan 2013-2030," which includes the following objectives:

1. Strengthen effective leadership and governance for mental health.

2. Provide comprehensive, integrated, and responsive mental health and social care services in community-based settings.

3. Implement strategies for promoting mental health, and preventing mental disorders, and suicide.

4. Strengthen information systems, evidence, and research for mental health.

To support countries in achieving these objectives, WHO provides technical assistance and resources, such as guidelines, tools, and evidence-based interventions. The WHO Mental Health Atlas series tracks global progress in implementing these objectives.

The WHO Special Initiative for Mental Health (2019-2023) aims to ensure access to quality mental health services for 100 million more people in 12 priority countries. The initiative is designed to catalyze political commitment, build national capacities, and mobilize resources for mental health.

In addition, WHO provides global leadership and coordination through the Mental Health and Substance Use Department, which is responsible for developing norms and standards, building evidence, and supporting countries in policy and service development.

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Mental health is a crucial aspect of overall health and well-being, and a basic human right. Numerous factors contribute to mental health, and it is essential to address these factors through promotion, prevention, and treatment strategies. By prioritizing mental health and working collaboratively across sectors, we can create a world that supports mental health for all.