Leisure and Mental Health*

HERE IS A great deal of factual information on the correlation between leisure/leisure activities and on the promotion and maintenance of physical health, but relatively little on their relationships with mental health. This is probably because physical health is relatively easy to define, whereas mental health is a much more abstract and subjective concept, implying causes and risk factors that are often difficult to identify. There is one area in which a rapidly-growing body of knowledge does exist i.e. the impact of therapeutic recreation on certain forms of mental illness. This topic, however, falls outside the scope of this paper. The purpose of this paper is to investigate, on the basis of the existing literature, if, and if so under which circumstances, leisure and leisure activities can make a contribution to the maintenance and promotion of people's mental health. While realising the interrelationships between mental health and the other aspects of people's total health (social, physical, spiritual and intellectual) and appreciating the limitations of taking a segmented approach to human behaviour and development, I believe that in order to identify cause-and-effect relationships with leisure and leisure activities, it will be necessary in this paper to concentrate on the mental health aspect. Based on this premise, I propose to deal with the subject in the following manner: