Community Mental Health

Dear Colleagues,

Community mental health has historically been associated with the deinstitutionalization of mental health treatment and recovery of people with severe and persistent mental illness, which has taken place to a lesser or greater extent internationally over the last ~60 years. This process has been based on the notion of community integration (i.e., the extent to which individuals live, participate, and socialize in their community), which continues to be a challenge for mental health systems, particularly as services face inadequate resourcing, operate within outdated legal and regulatory frameworks, and the experience overreliance on the biomedical model (WHO, 2021). To that end, care typically neglects the full range of social determinants that impact people’s mental health and is not successful in achieving community integration, resulting in inadequate care and hindering the recovery process. 

Across the continuum of care, community is also a valuable space for the prevention and treatment of mild to moderate mental illness, which has become more evident during the recent global pandemic. There is therefore a need for innovation and research into how we can provide better community mental health services across the ecosystem in order to support mental health services to provide quality care and support. Given the diversity of communities, it is vital that people who have lived experience of mental health in a given community have a voice within it.

This Special Issue of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH) focuses on the current and emergent state of knowledge of the community mental health ecosystem. New research papers, reviews, case reports, and conference papers are welcome in this issue. Papers dealing with the translation of evidence into practice and the role of lived experience in the design, delivery, and/or improvement of community mental health programs or interventions are particularly welcome. Other accepted manuscript types include epidemiological and modeling papers, methodological papers, position papers, brief reports, and commentaries.

Dr. Zoe Rutherford
Guest Editor

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