The WHO Special Initiative for Mental Health, launched in 2019, advances policies, advocacy and human rights, to rapidly scale-up quality interventions and services for people with mental, neurological and substance use conditions.

Countdown for Global Mental Health 2030 is a partnership between Global Mental Health @Harvard, WHO, UNICEF, the Global Mental Health Peer Network and United for Global Mental Health.

GMHAN is creating a global network where every campaigner and professional working in mental health has somewhere to go to access the support they need to make the change they want to see. We are delighted to share our 2023 Action Plan with you all, which highlights our ambitions, targets and ways of working for the year ahead.

The UHC working group of the Global Mental Health Action Network have produced a brief detailing their 8 key asks on integrating mental health into UHC.

The theme of World Mental Health Day 2022 was ‘Make Mental Health and Well-being a Global Priority for All.’ To realise this aspiration, we first need to recognise children and young people are a unique group, with their own particular psychological make-up and mental health needs.

Against a decade-long pattern of deteriorating mental health conditions among youth, Covid 19 pandemic made the situation far more worse. As per the Youth-led Action Research on Covid-19 pandemic on Marginalised Youth study, youth were forced to face the fear of losing their loved ones, stress, and anxiety over their future uncertainty, financial hardships, lack of opportunities and social isolation made them more vulnerable.

In 2022, we saw the largest gathering of our network to date, with over 600 participants from 77 countries across six virtual sessions of the GMHAN Annual meeting. As we look ahead to the planning of our 2023 Annual Meeting, we have listened to your feedback through our annual survey and other forums/channels and realise there is a big demand for us to convene in person once again!

To help us plan we would love to ask you some questions and get a better understanding of where, when and IF we should host our annual meeting in person in 2023.

For more than six decades the Bernard van Leer Foundation have worked to improve opportunities for young children and the people who care for them. Three years ago, we chose to pay more attention to caregivers’ mental health, recognizing its crucial role in giving babies and toddlers a good start in life. These are some of our insights with examples of how we have endeavoured with our partners to put our growing knowledge of mental health into action for the early years.

This year’s theme for World Mental Health Day was to make Mental Health & Wellbeing for all a Global Priority. Members of GMHAN around the world have raised our voices to demand both attention and action on mental health. Here are examples of what some of GMHAN’s 2200 members have done to celebrate World Mental Health Day 2022.

This year’s World Mental Health Day (WMHD) was observed with the theme “Make mental health and well-being for all a global priority”. This was an opportunity to highlight a pressing matter that is often neglected.

Mental health is a crucial issue for the well-being of an individual, however, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), 1 in every 8 people, or 970 million people around the world have mental health disorders.

Our network has always been about our members. People from different backgrounds, disciplines and lived experiences have been the inspiration for building a network that truly answers the complex needs of improving mental health worldwide.

As medical advances continue to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside entrenched and serious challenges, from the cost of living crisis to protracted conflicts to climate change; other priorities can be neglected in the face of such large issues.

That is why, World Mental Health Day on 10th October is such an appropriate opportunity to highlight the importance of mental health as an issue; and why this year’s theme, Making Mental Health & Well-Being for All a Global Priority, is so timely.

There has been great leaps and strides towards investments in mental health in Kenya in the last four years, and the Coalition Action for Preventative Mental Health Kenya (CAPMHK) has been leading the fight for decriminalization of suicide throughout the country through public awareness campaigns and community-based advocacy on social media, webinars and media.

COVID-19 has exacerbated mental health needs worldwide at an unprecedented scale, yet global mental health continues to attract limited political attention.