Mental health month was started by Mental Health America in 1949 as a way to raise awareness about chronic mental illnesses and the importance of good mental health for everyone. Today it’s promoted by organizations around the country, including the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and many peer support organizations.
Prevention Institute encourages an approach to mental health and wellbeing that emphasizes four key elements:
- Reframing mental health as more than the absence of mental illness. It is also a state of mental wellbeing and resilience.
See our Mental Health: A Path Forward Infographic and the paper it’s based on. - Promoting mental health strategies that emphasize prevention as an important complement to treatment and services.
Our new brief about preventing opioid misuse in Ohio highlights this approach, as does our Health Affairs op-ed, co-authored by Well Being Trust. - Expanding mental health approaches to address the community conditions that influence mental health and wellbeing as well as to focus on individuals.
These profiles show how coalitions in Tacoma, Washington, and San Diego, California, are promoting health and wellbeing by taking on community conditions. - Integrating gender-informed and cultural approaches to promote mental wellbeing, especially for communities with high rates of unaddressed mental health concerns.
This short video by the Movember Foundation, the cornerstone funder of our Making Connections for Mental Health and Wellbeing Among Men and Boys initiative, shows what it would look like if we helped men feel more comfortable talking about how they feel.
We hope you’ll join us in taking the opportunity provided by Mental Health Month to think about how we can all work together to reduce the stress, trauma, and isolation that are so prevalent in our society and have the potential to trigger mental health problems.
In addition to perusing the materials linked to above, we encourage you to learn more about our major bodies of work in the area of mental health and wellbeing, the Making Connections initiative and the Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience (ACE|R) framework.
Together, we can make a difference by building resilient, healthy communities where hope, trust, safety, belonging, dignity, and control of one’s destiny are the norm.