Throughout our lives, multiple individual, social and structural determinants can combine to protect or, conversely, undermine our mental health and change our position on the mental health continuum.
Various individual psychological and biological factors, such as emotional skills, substance use, and genetic characteristics, can make a person more susceptible to mental health disorders.
Exposure to unfavorable social, economic, geopolitical, and environmental circumstances, including poverty, violence, inequality, and adverse social conditions, also increases the risk of mental disorders.
Risk factors can occur at all stages of life, but those that occur during critical periods of human development, especially early childhood, have a particularly strong negative impact. For example, harsh parenting and physical punishment are known to undermine children’s mental health, and bullying at school is a major risk factor for the development of mental health disorders.
Similarly, protective factors also occur throughout a person’s life and contribute to building mental resilience. These factors include our individual social and emotional skills and qualities, as well as experiences of positive social interactions, quality education, decent work, living in a safe neighborhood, community cohesion, and more.
The influence of risk and protective factors can have different magnitudes. For example, local-level threats increase risk for individuals, families and communities. Global threats such as economic downturns, disease outbreaks, humanitarian emergencies, forced displacement, and the worsening climate crisis increase risk for entire populations.
The impact of each individual risk or protective factor is difficult to predict. For most people, exposure to a risk factor does not lead to the development of a mental disorder, while many people may develop mental disorders even in the absence of known risk factors. Nevertheless, a set of different interacting determinants of mental health can both promote and undermine mental health.