The Mental Health Foundation: developing a public mental health approach. Mental health and well‐being in later life
| Pages | 48-51 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/17465729200400020 |
| Date | 01 September 2004 |
| Published date | 01 September 2004 |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care |
The Mental Health Foundation was established in 1949
as a charity that funded clinical research – undertaken
by academic researchers – into the causes, treatment and
care of mental illness.1The Foundation’s grants
programme broadened in subsequent decades to include
support for innovative services provided by voluntary
organisations. From the early 1990s the Foundation also
began to develop in-house capacity to undertake its own
research work and to support and evaluate good practice
initiatives. In 1997 the Foundation commenced a major
programme of work on children and young people’s
mental health, Bright Futures.
The Foundation’s first major Bright Futures
report, published in 1999, explored measures to
promote children and young people’s mental well-
being and prevent mental health problems and
considered how the treatment and care of children
and young people could be improved. This work
represented a significant shift for the Foundation,
from a primary focus on mental health problems to
an agenda that addressed the full range of mental
health needs. Although the term was not used at the
time, Bright Futures embraces a public mental health
perspective.
Since Bright Futures was published in 1999, the
Foundation has affirmed its commitment to a public
mental health agenda, which can be broadly defined
as action to improve population mental health and
well-being.
The range of public mental health should
encompass interventions that help to:
•promote mental well-being
•prevent mental health problems
•provide effective treatment and care for people with
mental health problems that protect their human
rights and maximise quality of life and recovery.
Public mental health may involve interventions on one
or more of the above levels and can include:
•structural measures that affect the whole population
and/or targeted groups – such as fiscal policy or
national health and social care policy
•community-based interventions, such as improved
amenities or social support
•group/family or individual measures, such as home
support or counselling.
Public mental health is therefore a multi-disciplinary
endeavour that involves the natural and social sciences
and the arts and humanities. It is also a profoundly
political agenda in that it involves debates about needs,
rights and resources.
Since 2000, the Foundation has explored and
developed its public mental health perspective and
it now informs most, if not all, of its mental health
work. Key Foundation projects that have either been
explicitly informed by a public mental health approach
or that can be comfortably accommodated within it are
set out below.
Inquiries and research
•A scoping study on the theory, policy and practice
for public mental health in the UK (commenced
2004)
•A joint Foundation/SUSTAIN scoping study on
diet and mental health (commenced 2004)
•A major joint Foundation/Age Concern UK inquiry
into the mental health of people in later life
(commenced 2003)
•A joint Foundation/Camelot Foundation UK inquiry
on young people and self-harm (commenced 2003)
•Research on mental health and young homelessness
(commenced 2004)
•Research on self-help for people with mental health
problems (commenced 2003)
•User-led research on effective support for people
with mental health problems (phase 2 completed in
2003, further work in progress)
The Mental Health Foundation: developing a
public mental health approach
journal of mental health promotion •volume 3•issue 3 •september 2004 © Pavilion Publishing (Brighton) Ltd
48
1The Foundation has also always supported work to meet the needs of people with learning disability, but the focus of this article is on its mental health activity.
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