Mental health is made in every ministry

By Ülla-Karin Nurm, Director of the NDPHS Secretariat, Policy Area Health Coordinator, EUSBSR

Ask most people where mental health is looked after and they will point to a clinic, a counsellor or a helpline. Those matter. But whether a person stays well or is able to recover is decided largely elsewhere: in the rent they pay, the job they hold or lose, the school their child attends, the street they walk home on.

That is our message this World Mental Health Day, 10 October: Mental health is made, or worn down, by decisions taken in every ministry and every town hall. This year’s theme, Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change, makes the same point from another angle. People living with mental health conditions know best how housing, debt, work and stigma shape their recovery, and their voices belong in those policy discussions.

Services alone cannot carry the load

WHO estimates that over a billion people live with a mental health condition. Services must grow, but no health system can treat its way out of a problem on that scale. Income, insecure work, housing, pressure at school, discrimination and loneliness are shaped by finance, labour, education and social policy, not by health ministries.

The OECD reaches the same conclusion in its 2026 report on the economic case for prevention: clinical interventions cannot counteract the factors that give rise to mental ill health in the first place. More investment in services is needed, but on its own it treats the symptoms rather than the causes. What is needed is a shift from asking people to cope better to changing the conditions they live in.

What mental health in all policies asks

The approach puts a few plain questions to every policy. How does it affect the conditions people need to stay well? Does it narrow or widen the gaps between groups? What does it gain for the sector itself? And who answers for its effects?

The third question is what makes it work. Children who are well learn better, and workers who are well take fewer sick days. An education or finance ministry does not need to care about mental health for its own sake to see the return.

Progress is slow for familiar reasons: separate budgets, short political cycles, thin or poorly recognised evidence and lingering stigma. What helps is also known: a clear mandate, people whose job is to work across ministries, shared data, and framing around goals other sectors already have.

From projects to policy in the Baltic Sea Region

In the Baltic Sea Region we are working to make this practical. The Baltic Sea Mental Health Platform, funded by the Interreg Baltic Sea Region Programme and led by Policy Area Health, which is coordinated by the NDPHS Secretariat, brings together results from more than a dozen Interreg and EU-funded projects, from arts on prescription to school and workplace programmes.

With Odense Municipality, Poznań University of Life Sciences, the International Sport and Culture Association and the Estonian Coalition for Mental Health and Well-being, the platform turns what has been tested in schools, workplaces and communities into recommendations that national and regional decision-makers can use. It runs until June 2028.

For regional cooperation, this means that good practice no longer has to end when a project does: what works in one city or country can be adapted in another, and governments can learn from each other’s policy choices. As coordinator of Policy Area Health in the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region, the NDPHS links these results to the wider Strategy and to ministries in partner countries, so tested approaches reach the people who make policy.

One question for every decision

A housing plan, a school reform, a change to benefits or bus routes: each is also a mental health policy, whether anyone calls it that or not. The most useful thing governments can do is make it routine to ask what a decision will do to people’s mental health, and to ask those most affected before it is made.

Further reading:

• World Federation for Mental Health: World Mental Health Day 2026
• WHO (2025): Over a billion people living with mental health conditions
• Interreg Baltic Sea Region: New project platform boosts cooperation for better mental health
• OECD (2026), The Economic Case for Preventing Mental Ill Health, OECD Health Policy Studies, OECD Publishing, Paris.

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