Research and publications
| Published date | 01 March 2007 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/17465729200700007 |
| Date | 01 March 2007 |
| Pages | 42-44 |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care |
Research and publications
UPDATE
42 journal of public mental health
vol 6 • issue 1
Public mental health
Taylor L,Taske N, Swaan C,Waller S (2007) Public
health interventions to promote positive mental health
and prevent mental health disorders among adults.
Evidence briefing. London: NICE.
www.nice.org.uk/download.aspx?o=401001
This evidence briefing, commissioned by the
Health Development Agency, is a review of
reviews of the effectiveness of non-
pharmacological public mental health
interventions for adults. Systematic searching and
subsequent appraisal of English language literature
published from January 1995 to October 2004
resulted in 20 papers meeting the review criteria.
Notably,the review incorporates the prevention of
mental disorders as well as the promotion of
positive mental health, resulting in many of the
findings tipping towards the former category.The
authors state, for example, that review-level
evidence exists that shows that primary care
counselling for people presenting with broad
psychological and psychosocial problems is
associated with modest short-term gains vis-à-vis
psychological symptoms. Indeed, many of the
findings centre on various kinds of therapy (eg.
cognitive behavioural therapy, family
interventions, individual and group counselling,
rational emotive therapy parenting programmes);
far fewer findings are reported from interventions
at a community or population level. Review-level
evidence does exist, nonetheless, on how
volunteering by older people improves their quality
of life, and how participation in physical activity is
positively associated with improved mood,
emotion and psychological well-being. The review
notes, however, how ‘[l]ittle review-level evidence
was identified regarding the effectiveness of
interventions delivered in or across different
settings, or of interventions that aimed to
influence a person’s environment in a way that may
positively affect their mental health’. The limited
breadth of interventions that satisfy the review
criteria undoubtedly indicates, once again, some of
the difficulties associated with orthodox evidence
hierarchies.
Child well-being 1
Unicef (2007) Child poverty in perspective: an
overview of child well-being in rich countries.
Innocenti report card 7. Florence: Unicef Innocenti
Research Centre.
This report, widely publicised in the national press,
from the Unicef Innocenti Research Centre in
Florence summarises research on the well-being of
children and young people in 21 nation states of the
industrialised world. (It should be noted that some
OECD countries – Australia, Iceland, Japan,
Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, the Slovak
Republic, South Korea and Turkey – did not have
sufficient data to be included.) Previous titles in the
series used income poverty as a proxy for overall
child well-being. This report uses six dimensions
(and 40 indicators): material well-being, health and
safety,education, peer and family relationships,
behaviours and risks, and young people’s subjective
sense of well-being. Northern European countries
appear at the top (with The Netherlands at the
head), although no country features in the top third
of the rankings for all six dimensions, and several
countries have very different rankings for different
well-being dimensions. The report shows that no
obvious relationship exists between child well-being
and GDP per capita, and that, while poverty affects
many aspects of child well-being (including health,
cognitive development, achievement at school,
aspirations, self-perceptions, relationships, risk
behaviours and employment prospects), it alone
cannot provide an adequate indicator of children’s
well-being. The authors stress, moreover, that
country comparisons ‘demonstrate that given levels
of child well-being are not inevitable but policy-
susceptible’.
The report acknowledges that many of the
datasets used are incomplete or imprecise, and
cannot be wholly freed from ‘questions of
translation, culture and custom’. Concerns have
been raised over using the percentage of children
living in single-parent families or stepfamilies as an
indicator of well-being, for example, and the authors
themselves write of the challenge of finding
appropriate subjective indicators to assess the
psychological and social aspects of social well-being.
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