Summary

In the present report, submitted pursuant to Human Rights Council resolution 42/16, the Special Rapporteur elaborates on the elements that are needed to set a rights-based global agenda for advancing the right to mental health.

The Special Rapporteur welcomes international recognition that there is no health without mental health and appreciates the different worldwide initiatives to advance all elements of global mental health: promotion, prevention, treatment, rehabilitation and recovery. However, he also emphasizes that despite promising trends, there remains a global failure of the status quo to address human rights violations in mental health-care systems. This frozen status quo reinforces a vicious cycle of discrimination, disempowerment, coercion, social exclusion and injustice. To end the cycle, distress, treatment and support must be seen more broadly and move far beyond a biomedical understanding of mental health. Global, regional and national conversations are needed to discuss how to understand and respond to mental health conditions. Those discussions and actions must be rights-based, holistic and rooted in the lived experience of those left furthest behind by harmful sociopolitical systems, institutions and practices.

The Special Rapporteur makes a number of recommendations for States, for organizations representing the psychiatric profession and for the World Health Organization.