Mental health is really a state of mental well-being that enables people to cope with the stresses of life, realize their abilities, learn well and work well, and contribute with their community. It is an important element of health and well-being that underpins our individual and collective abilities to create decisions, build relationships and shape the world we live in. Mental health is just a basic human right. And it is essential to personal, community and socio-economic development.
Mental health is more compared to the absence of mental disorders. It exists on a sophisticated continuum, that is experienced differently from anyone to another location, with varying examples of difficulty and distress and potentially different social and clinical outcomes.
Mental health conditions include mental disorders and psychosocial disabilities in addition to other mental states associated with significant distress, impairment in functioning, or danger of self-harm. People with mental health conditions are more prone to experience lower degrees of mental well-being, but this is not always or necessarily the case. Determinants of mental health
Throughout our lives, multiple individual, social and structural determinants may combine to safeguard or undermine our mental health and shift our position on the mental health continuum.
Individual psychological and biological factors such as for instance emotional skills, substance use and genetics will make people more susceptible to mental health problems.
Contact with unfavourable social, economic, geopolitical and environmental circumstances – including poverty, violence, inequality and environmental deprivation – also increases people's threat of experiencing mental health conditions.
Risks can manifest themselves at all stages of life, but those that occur during developmentally sensitive periods, especially early childhood, are particularly detrimental. As an example, harsh parenting and physical punishment is recognized to undermine child health and bullying is a respected risk factor for mental health conditions.
Protective factors similarly occur throughout our lives and serve to strengthen resilience. They include our individual social and emotional skills and attributes in addition to positive social interactions, quality education, decent work, safe neighbourhoods and community cohesion, among others.
Mental health risks and protective factors are available in society at different scales. Local threats heighten risk for individuals, families and communities. Global threats heighten risk for whole populations and include economic downturns, disease outbreaks, humanitarian emergencies and forced displacement and the growing climate crisis.
Each single risk and protective factor has only limited predictive strength. Many people don't develop a mental health condition despite experience of a risk factor and many individuals without known risk factor still develop a mental health condition. Nonetheless, the interacting determinants of mental health serve to enhance or undermine mental health.