WP5 – Building bricks for integrated and comprehensive Mental Health and Wellbeing Actions

Work Package Summary

WP5 aims at contributing to furthering actions to address mental health in a more comprehensive way that spans across different policy domains. The building of a new comprehensive, prevention and promotion-oriented multilateral approach to mental health. WP5 activities are designed to meet the overall MENTOR goal of promoting mental health by sharing experiences from policy to clinical and from individual to population levels. WP5 addresses the needs of people with defined mental disorders but also intends to promote the mental health of European region population, recognizing the intrinsic value of positive mental health. In this framework, Project Partners will work on new approaches and actions throughout the EU, in line with the Healthier Together EU NCD initiative, which aims to promote mental health and prevent and address at the population-level mental health problems and mental disorders, and to set up ways to support people living with mental disorders.

WP5 capitalizes on this initiative and focuses on:

  • building capacity to better understand and develop an approach that integrates mental health in and for policies in different domains,
  • promoting mental health interventions in communities focusing on vulnerable groups (e.g., youth, migrants, refugees, ROMA people and persons displaced from Ukraine) and fighting stigma,
  • aligning with existing initiatives focused on capacity building at policy level in the EU (e.g. the work by the WHO Regional Office for Europe as funded via the EU4Health programme as a flagship initiative on mental health),
  • improve equal access to mental health care for people with mental health disorders highlighting the importance of People with lived experience (PLE) inclusion in mental health care service design,
  • enhancing social inclusion, tackling stigma and discrimination associated with mental health issues.

Therefore, the specific objective of WP5 is to promote the creation of an ecosystem in which MS can work closely on different policies in mental health issues, mental health promotion and prevention interventions and best practices, promoting an integrated policy approach to mental health, as well as person-centered care pathways in mental health services and policies, also with the support of PLE. To do this, Partners structures WP5 into 4 tasks, representing the 4 bricks through which the partnership intends to establish and develop a common ground for the development of the global approach, described below.

Firstly, the state of play with regards to the implementation of a Mental Health in All Policies (MHIAP) approach will be mapped, and a flexible methodology/process will be developed subsequently to support Member States. This is the starting point to showcase how mental health can be embedded in and for different policies to recognize the important contribution of other policies to mental health, capitalize on these and ensure flexible, well-informed policy and actions that consider contexts, available resources, and genuinely achievable results.

The second task, another significant building brick, focuses on the topic of promotion/prevention, emphasizing its implementation in different community settings (school, workplaces, leisure time, etc.) with the contribution of other policies for the co-programming. Partners have specifically chosen to dedicate this task to vulnerable groups of population and in particular young people among those groups, in order to be more effective in terms of results, given the focus on personalized approach.

The third brick focuses on the inclusion of PLE in the development and implementation of mental health policies, another crucial element in building the strategy. In this context, special attention is given to human resources (including PLE) as a key factor in policy development and implementation of mental health policies.

The fourth and final task, which will integrate with the previous activities, aims to analyze the different policies and services, organization for Mental health in the Member States and to promote the definition and implementation of an integrated care pathway (policies, funds, services, human resources, etc.) targeted on the person’s needs and preferences and aimed at his/her recovery and inclusion in the community.

The specific outcomes of the WP5 are:

  • Developed/encouraged collaboration among different policies in mental health issues;
  • Supported national and regional policy-makers in the design, implementation and innovation of mental health in all policy (MHIAP) approaches by developing and piloting a flexible methodology to support implementation of MHIAP;
  • Identified evidence-based and innovative best practices for the promotion and prevention interventions targeted to vulnerable groups and tackling stigma and discrimination associated with mental health problems and addiction by sharing good practices, methods;
  • Empowered people with lived experience (PLE) and their inclusion in mental health policy and services;
  • Provided care pathways to promote proactive and person-centered care for people with mental health disorders through the Personal Budget methodology.

Tasks