The leadership for mental health is not commensurate with the burden of mental, neurological, and substance (MNS) use disorders nationally or internationally. This is a sentiment I share with Prof. Jenkins (1) and Ms. Lee (2). With that said, I would like to make two clarifications about my study and two concomitant acknowledgements about its limitations (3). First, I conceptualized national me...

BACKGROUND The Mental Health Country Profile is a tool that was generated by the International Mental Health Policy and Services Project to inform policy makers, professionals and other key stakeholders about important issues which need to be considered in mental health policy development. The Mental Health Country Profile contains four domains, which include the mental health context, resource...

Ensuring that a mental health system provides 'value for money' requires policy makers to allocate resources to the most cost-effective interventions. Organizing cost-effective interventions into a service delivery framework will require a concept that can guide the mapping of evidence regarding disorder-level interventions to aggregations of services that are meaningful for policy makers. The ...

Background: According to both the WHO Europe and the European Commission, youth mental health is a key area of concern in Europe. Fifty-two European countries signed a declaration and action plan for mental health at the Helsinki Conference in January 2005, with youth mental health a top priority. Methods: This paper reviews the theory, research, and practice on the topic in the WHO European Re...

There exists a disconnection between evolving policies in the policy arenas of mental health, housing, and income support in Canada. One of the complexities associated with analysing the intersection of these policies is that federal, provincial, and municipal level policies are involved. Canada is one of the few developed countries without a national mental health policy and because of the fed...

BACKGROUND Following the tenets of world polity and innovation diffusion theories, I focus on the coercive and mimetic forces that influence the diffusion of mental health policy across nations. International organizations' mandates influence government behavior. Dependency on external resources, namely foreign aid, also affects governments' formulation of national policy. And finally, mounting...

The association between mental illness and poor physical health and socioeconomic outcomes has been well established. In the twenty-first century, the challenge of how mental illnesses, such as psychosis, are managed in the provision of public health services remains complex. Developing effective clinical mental health support and interventions for individuals requires a coordinated and robust ...

BACKGROUND The Zanzibar Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, concerned about mental health in the country, requested technical assistance from WHO in 1997. AIMS This article describes the facilitation over many years by a WHO Collaborating Centre, of sustainable mental health developments in Zanzibar, one of the poorest countries in the world, using systematic approaches to policy design an...

BACKGROUND There is sustained interest in public health circles in assessing the effects of policies on health and health inequalities. We report on the theory, methods and findings of a project which involved an appraisal of current Scottish policy with respect to its potential impacts on mental health and wellbeing. METHODS We developed a method of assessing the degree of alignment between ...