Mental health promotion theory: review and application
| Published date | 01 March 2005 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/17465729200500004 |
| Date | 01 March 2005 |
| Pages | 10-12 |
| Author | Jenny Secker |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care |
Taking the principles of health promotion as a starting point, this paper begins with a review of the
ways in which mental health has been defined in the mental health promotion literature. In order to
move beyond definitions that revolve only around the absence of illness or reductionist lists of
individual skills and attributes, it then introduces a model derived from health promotion theory.
Finally,the paper concludes with an example of the model’s application to promoting the well-being
of mental health service usersthrough the provision of evidence-based employment suppor t.
Mental health promotion
theory: review and application
Jenny Secker
Professor of mental health
Anglia Polytechnic
University/South Essex
Partnership NHS Trust
j.secker@apu.ac.uk
REVIEW
10 journal of public mental health
vol 4 • issue 1
Asadiscipline and profession, health
promotion has attempted to differentiate
itself from its contributory disciplines by
emphasising the importance of a number
of key principles for health promotion
practice. These include:
lmoving away from reductionist approaches to
health that focus on narrow segments of people’s
lives towards an holistic approach that takes
account of people’s lived experience in all its social
and biographical complexity
laclear focus on the promotion of positive health, or
well-being, alongside the prevention of ill health
laddressing the structural issues, such as
discrimination, poverty and unemployment, that
affect our health and the choices we make, as well as
focusing on the knowledge and behaviour of
individuals or groups of people.
Arguably, if these principles are not reflected in mental
health promotion practice, the potential for developing
new approaches to complement those of other
professions will not be fulfilled. Instead, we will simply
have invented ‘a new title for an old story’, as the World
Health Organization put it almost two decades ago
(WHO, 1986), within which the dominant themes are
imported uncritically from other disciplines and
professions. This paper therefore takes the three
principles listed above as the starting point for a review
of mental health promotion theory.Approaches to the
definition of mental health are considered first, and a
model derived from the health promotion literature is
then presented as providing a way forward for mental
health promotion. The paper concludes with an
example of the strengths of the model in relation to
promoting the mental well-being of mental health
service users.
Definitions of mental health
The literature of mental health promotion reveals a
number of problems in relation to the ways in which
mental health is defined. In particular,in contrast with
the emphasis of health promotion on health as more
than simply the absence of illness, definitions of mental
health in which the emphasis remains on illness are
common. This reflects the pervasive influence of a
psychiatric perspective, from which mental health is
seen as no more than the absence of illness. In turn, the
promotion of positive mental health has been portrayed
as a meaningless endeavour (Royal College of
Psychiatrists, 1993), and the prevention of illness is seen
as the sole purpose of mental health promotion.
Amore positive approach, at first sight, is the
notion of a continuum from mental health to mental
illness on which we are all located and along which we
might move back and forth depending on our life
circumstances. From a campaigning perspective, this is
auseful conceptualisation because it does alert us to the
fact that any of us might experience mental ill health.
But from a health promotion perspective, the
continuum approach fails to take us very far, because
again mental health is seen only as the absence, albeit
in this case the relative absence, of mental illness.
Where more positive definitions are employed,
these nevertheless pose problems in relation to other
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