Public Health Approach on Mental Health in Europe

Citation

Weare, K. (2001), "Public Health Approach on Mental Health in Europe", Health Education, Vol. 101 No. 3, pp. 139-141. https://doi.org/10.1108/he.2001.101.3.139.3

This book is the result of a recent project, funded by the European Commission, called “Putting Mental Health on the European Agenda”. The project brought together many of those engaged in work on mental health right across Europe in a series of conferences last year, and many of these eminent researchers and practitioners have contributed to this resultant book. Although aimed overtly at political decision makers in Europe, the agenda outlined in this book will make a useful starting point and support for anyone engaged in working on mental health at a social and community level.

The aim of the project was to gain more value and visibility for mental health and its promotion within Europe, and the strongest message of the book is that mental health needs to be lifted from its status as the “cinderella” of the health service and be placed at the heart of health promotion. As the catchy project slogan boldly asserts, “there is no health without mental health”: in other words mental health is an indivisible part of public health, and we cannot achieve sound levels of physical or social health without it. The book manages to argue this position very convincingly, with alarming statistics about the massive personal, medical, and social burden represented by mental health problems.

Most work on “mental health” is in fact about mental illness, but as the book reminds us in its opening sections on “definitions and concepts”, mental health should rightly include the promotion of positive mental health. The first section contains some extremely useful definitions and models that start from a positive base. After this promising beginning, the book then rather reverts to type, and employs a problem‐based, and indeed largely an illness‐based, perspective on mental health – the largest section of the book is devoted to an examination of the nature, causes, prevention and treatment of mental health pathologies such as anxiety, depression, suicide, schizophrenia and dementia. The book cannot be blamed for this problem‐centred orientation, as work on the promotion of positive wellbeing is in its infancy, but it would be useful if it had recognised this paradox, called for more work on this issue, and shown more awareness of what little does exist that is of a genuinely positive nature. That said, the book’s analyses of the causes and best ways of tackling of mental health problems are refreshingly broad and social, and its conviction about the preventability of these problems is upbeat and proactive. It suggests that there is plenty of evidence for how mental health problems can best be tackled, and summarises much of this evidence very effectively. The final 30 pages or so present some very illuminating models of good practice which describe mainly educational and social interventions: they include work to educate parents, to tackle unemployment, and support young isolated mothers, for example. The book, and its shorter “keynote statement” style partner, “Public Health Action Framework on Mental Health” are a welcome addition to the hitherto neglected, but now cheeringly growing, field of the promotion of mental health and the prevention of mental health problems through public health means. They provide a useful bedrock of principle from which other initiatives can grow.