Key Facts
- There are affordable, effective and feasible strategies to promote, protect and restore mental health;
- The need for action on mental health is unquestionable and urgent;
- Mental health is essential, both in its own right and as an integral condition of a person’s overall health and well-being;
- The level of mental health is a consequence of the influence and interaction of a complex of individual, social and structural sources of stress and vulnerabilities.
Mental health is a state of mental well-being that enables people to cope with stressful situations in life, realize their potential, learn and work successfully, and contribute to society. It is an integral component of health and well-being that underpins our individual and collective abilities to make decisions, build relationships and shape the world in which we live. Mental health is a basic human right. It is also crucial for personal, community and socio-economic development.
Mental health is not the absence of mental disorders. It is an individualized continuum in which individuals experience a range of factors of varying degrees of complexity and stress, resulting in very different potential social and clinical outcomes for each individual.
Mental health disorders are a collective concept encompassing mental disorders, various types of psychosocial disabilities, and other psychiatric pathological conditions involving significant distress, functional impairment, or risk of self-harm. In general, persons with mental health problems are more likely to experience lower levels of mental well-being, although there may be exceptions.