Insights from across the region: a new article series on mental health

The BSR Mental Health Platform has started a new article series, BSR Mental Health Insights. Each edition brings forward one voice from the region and one idea worth pausing on, drawn from the people working on mental health promotion, prevention and support across the Baltic Sea Region.

What the contributors have in common is a connection to the platform and the work around it. Beyond that, the range is open and deliberately so, because the questions the platform works on cut across sectors, professions and countries. Each edition takes one idea from that work and sets it out plainly. The pieces are short, they stand on their own, and they are written for anyone with an interest in the subject rather than for specialists only.

Four themes

The platform brings together results from 13 EU funded projects and organises them around four themes. The series follows those themes and makes them easier to get to.

Mental health at school and at work. Schools and workplaces are where most people spend the largest part of their day, and both can either support mental health or add to the strain. This theme looks at psychosocial risks in the two settings, at what has been shown to work in promoting mental health there, and at the conditions that allow good practice to take hold or hold it back.

Mental health across the lifecourse. Needs and risks change from early childhood to old age. This theme looks at age-specific risks, at what helps people stay included at each stage, and at how physical and social environments, from schools and youth services to care homes and public spaces, shape mental well-being over time.

Mental health and physical activity. Sport, movement and time spent in nature are used to support mental health in many different ways, both organised and informal, and often with groups in vulnerable situations. This theme looks at what these approaches achieve and at what makes it possible, or difficult, to build physical activity into mental health strategies in schools and communities.

The benefits of arts and culture on mental health. Community based arts and cultural activity, including arts on prescription, is used to support mental health and social inclusion, for example among older people and people experiencing isolation. This theme looks at which art forms, settings and target groups the evidence points to, and at what it takes for these offers to work in practice.

Taken together, the four themes point to the same larger question: what makes a society resilient? Resilience is usually described in terms of how quickly systems recover after a crisis. It depends just as much on whether people have the relationships, settings and everyday support that help them stay well before a crisis arrives.

Follow the series

New editions appear on the NDPHS LinkedIn channel, Facebook page, the Mental Health Baltic Sea Region Instagram page and will be regularly summarized on the BSR Mental Health Platform website.

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