The fundamental component of health is mental wellness and there are ample different ways to promote mental health awareness. The Constitution of the World Health Organization reads, ‘Health is not just a lack of illness or disease and a condition of the whole physical, mental and social well-being’. One key implication of this concept is that the absence of mental illness or disability is more than mental wellness.
Mental health is a condition of well-being in which a person can develop their skills, deal with the everyday pressures of life, work well, and contribute to their community.
Our communal and individual ability to comprehend, emotion, interact, gain a living, and enjoy life is based on mental health. This may be seen as an essential concern of an individual, communities, and societies worldwide to support, preserve and restore mental health. Counselling services can help you cope with these issues and overcome your mental health issues.
Mental health factors
The degree of mental health of an individual at any moment is determined by several social, psychological, and biological variables. For example, the risk to mental health is acknowledged for violence and prolonged socio-economic strain. Sexual violence is the most evident proof.
Poor mental health also involves:
- Rapid societal changes.
- Difficult working circumstances.
- Discrimination in gender.
- Isolation from society.
- Unhealthy lifestyles.
- Physical disease.
- Breaches of human rights.
Specific psychological and personality characteristics render persons prone to issues of mental health. Genetic variables are part of biological hazards.
Promoting and protecting mental health
There are ways to promote mental health awareness, which can enhance mental well-being. This might entail establishing an overall mental health-enhancing atmosphere in the long run.
Mental health is vital to an environment that respects and defends all people’s fundamental civil, democratic, socio-economic, and human rights. It is impossible to sustain a good level of mental health without the liberty and safety afforded by these rights.
National policy on mental health must address both mental illnesses and broader mental health concerns. Promoting mental health should be incorporated into the policies and initiatives, both governmental and non-governmental. The education, labor, justice, transportation, environment, housing, and welfare sectors and the health sector are critical.
Different Ways to Promote Mental Health Awareness
Let us learn about a few ways to promote mental health awareness:
- Early childhood interventions, for example, creating a stable, health- and nutritional-sensitive environment, protecting against hazards, early education, and receptive and emotionally supportive relationships.
- Support to children, such as programs for life skills, development programs for children and youth.
- Empowering Women, for example, boosting access to education and microcredit schemes, are socio-economic empowerment.
- Social support of older people such as friends, community centers, and daycare centers for the elderly.
- Vulnerable populations targeted programs including minorities, indigenous people, migrants, and war and disaster-affected individuals, for example, following calamities, psycho-social treatments.
- Promotional mental health initiatives in schools, such as programs incorporating ecological improvements supporting schools.
- Interventions on workplace mental health, e.g., programs on stress prevention.
- Home policy, e.g., upgrading of housing.
- Program for violence prevention, e.g., decreasing alcohol availability and guns access.
- Community development initiatives such as integrated rural development.
- Reducing poverty and protecting the poor socially.
- Laws and campaigns against prejudice.
- Promoting persons with mental illnesses rights, opportunity, and care.
Care and treatment for mental health
It is essential to safeguard and promote the psychological good of their fellow citizens and meet the requirements of people with identified mental illnesses as a part of the national efforts to design and execute mental health policies.
A few practical ways to promote mental health awareness and knowledge around mental disorders during the last decade has improved significantly. There are emerging indications that essential treatments for prioritized mental illness in nations at all economic development stages have been successful and cost-efficient.
