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

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 Member States 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.