Mental health

What is meant by mental health?

According to the World Health Organization, mental health can be defined as:

…a state of psychological well-being that allows people to cope with the stresses of life, realize their abilities, learn and work well, and contribute to their community. It is an integral component of health and well-being that underpins our individual and collective capacities to make decisions, build relationships, and shape the world in which we live. Mental health is a fundamental human right. It is essential for personal, community, and socio-economic development.

Mental health is more than the absence of mental disorders. It exists on a complex continuum, experienced differently by each individual, with varying degrees of difficulty and distress and potentially very different social and clinical outcomes.

Mental health conditions include mental disorders and psychosocial disabilities, as well as other mental states associated with significant distress, impaired functioning, or risk of self-harm. People with mental health problems are more likely to experience lower levels of mental well-being, but this is not always or necessarily the case. (1)

What are the protective and risk factors for mental health?

Various factors can contribute to determining mental health, both at an individual and social level, and these may vary subjectively, so individuals may interact differently with different factors.

Risk factors

Among individual psychological and biological risk factors, we find:

• Poorly developed emotional skills
• Substance use
• Genetics

Among social, economic, geopolitical, and environmental risk factors, we find:

• Poverty
• Violence
• Inequality
• Environmental deprivation

Although the promotion of mental health requires attention throughout the lifespan, there are developmental stages that are particularly vulnerable, especially early childhood. For example, it is known that overly harsh parenting and physical punishment impair children’s mental health, as well as bullyingAlthough there is no universally agreed-upon definition of b... More being a major risk factor for the mental health of infants and adolescents.

Protective factors

Protective factors for mental health are defined as those capable of strengthening resilienceWhat is meant by resilience? According to the American Psych... More. At the individual level, protective factors include:

• Social and emotional skills and traits
• Meditative practices and other self-care activities
• Quality education
• Dignified work

At the social level, we find, among others:

• Balanced family environment
• Positive social interactions
• Safe neighborhoods
• Community cohesion

It should also be considered that mental health risks and protective factors can be identified on a large scale. Global threats increase the risk for entire populations and include economic recessions, epidemics, humanitarian emergencies, forced displacements, and the growing climate crisis.

The emergency context

According to the World Health Organization, with the health emergency first, and now with an international war, we have entered an additional form of social/psychological emergency, resulting in an exponential increase in mental disorders:

• • Increase in depressive disorders: +27%
  • 1 in 8 people worldwide suffers from mental disorders
  • 300 million people worldwide suffer from anxietyAnxiety is an emotional response characterized by feelings o... More
  • 280 million from depressionDepression is a disorder characterized by persistent sadness... More (3.5 million in Italy)
  • 64 million people diagnosed with bipolar disorder
  • 700,000 people die by suicide every year (3,000 per day)

Among adolescents cases of mental disorders have increased, with a +40% rise in self-harm, isolation, school dropout‘School dropout’ refers to the phenomenon in which a you... More, and distress:

• • • 1 in 7 adolescents lives with a mental disorder
    • In Italy alone, it is estimated that 2 million children and adolescents neither study nor work
    • Hospital admissions for anxiety and depression in psychiatric emergency departments are steadily increasing (+25% at Bambino Gesù Hospital)
    • Suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people
    • Strong increase in telephone support services such as “Telefono Amico / Giallo / Azzurro”

The social cost of mental health (depression, school dropout, lower employment and productivity) is estimated at around 4% of global GDP.

Main medical and psychological theories and scholars who investigated normal and pathological development of the individual

To understand how to develop interventions aimed at improving mental health both preventively and therapeutically, scholars have moved from a purely biomedical approach (the oldest, dating back to Descartes) to a biopsychosocial approach, combining biological-symptomatic, psychological, and socio-relational perspectives.

In this context, leading to recent integrated approaches—such as dimensional and categorical personality studies—one must also mention intrapsychic and psychoanalytic studies (late 1800s), cognitive-behavioral studies (late 1950s), and psycho-relational studies (1960s onward).

Here are some key authors:

• Behaviorist, Darwinian, and cognitive area:
  • Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), studies on conditioning;
  • Jean Piaget (1896-1980), studied relationships between the individual who knows and the world they seek to know; key concepts: functional invariants and structures;
  • Frederick Skinner (1904-1990), studies on positive and negative reinforcement;
  • James Baldwin (1861-1934), evolutionary approach to genetic psychology;
  • Aaron Beck (1921-2021), developed cognitive theory enabling various interventions for psychopathological symptoms;
  • Albert Bandura (1925-2021), studied central role of cognitive, vicarious, self-regulatory, and adaptive processes;
  • Alan Kazdin (born 1945), focused on bridging clinical practice and research, developing evaluation guidelines.

• Phenomenological and psychodynamic area:
  • Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), based on phenomenology, argued that philosophical inquiry begins with consciousness phenomena, which reveal the essence of actions;
  • Alfred Adler (1870-1937), individual psychology, subordinating impulses, feelings, emotions, memory, and unconscious to lifestyle;
  • Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), psychoanalytic theory, personality development, human motivation;
  • Carl Jung (1875-1961), revised Freudian psychoanalysis, focusing on dream interpretation and personality subtyping;
  • Anna Freud (1895-1982), child psychoanalysis specialist.

• Relational and attachment area:
  • John Bowlby (1907-1990), formulated attachment theory, conceptualizing the child-mother bond;
  • Mary Ainsworth (1913-1999), researched infant-mother relationships and extended attachment research across the lifespan.

• Integrated approaches area:
  • Viktor Frankl (born 1905), developed a theory on “man’s search for meaning”;
  • Martin Seligman (born 1942), reformulated learned helplessness, highlighting how attributions regulate its expression, and later developed Positive Psychology applications.