Mental Health and Psychosocial Support

Urges Member States to promote and improve mental health services as an essential component of universal health coverage by, inter alia, integrating a human rights perspective into mental health and community services, to adopt, implement, update, strengthen or monitor, as appropriate, all existing laws and policies relating to mental health, with a view to eliminating all forms of discrimination, stigma, stereotypes, prejudice, violence, abuse, social exclusion, segregation, unlawful or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, medical institutionalization, and overmedicalization within that context and to promote the rights of persons with mental health conditions and psychosocial disabilities, enabling them to live independently with full inclusion and effective participation in society and to decide upon matters affecting them on an equal basis with others;

Encourages Member States and relevant stakeholders to work with national emergency committees and mental health providers in order to include mental health and psychosocial support needs in emergency preparedness and response plans and enable access to age- and gender-sensitive, and disability-inclusive, safe and supportive services that address psychological trauma, including that caused by disasters and armed conflicts, for all, including health workers and humanitarian personnel, during and following emergencies, with due attention to the longer-term funding required to build or rebuild community-based, resilient mental health systems after the emergency;

Calls upon Member States and all relevant actors to invest in local and community-based action, embedded in local and national services, on a longer-term basis to prepare for and respond to mental health and psychosocial needs, including comprehensive and integrated mental health and psychosocial support services;

Calls upon Member States to mobilize and allocate adequate, predictable and sustainable resources for national responses to prevent and control non-communicable diseases and to promote mental health and well-being through domestic, bilateral and multilateral channels, including international cooperation and official development assistance, and to continue to explore voluntary innovative financing mechanisms and partnerships, including with the private sector, to advance action at all levels;

Urges Member States to promote a paradigm shift in mental health, inter alia, in the fields of clinical practice, policy, research, medical education and investment, through the promotion of community- and evidence-based and people-centred services and by respecting, protecting and fulfilling human rights, individual autonomy of persons using or seeking to use mental health services, including by relying on peer support, as appropriate, and by providing a range of voluntary supported decision-making mechanisms, such as safeguards against abuse, coercion and undue influence within support arrangements, over a model based on the dominance of biomedical interventions, medicalization and institutionalization;

Urges Member States, the United Nations and humanitarian organizations to increase efforts to provide and fund cross-sectoral mental health and psychosocial support services that are of quality, contextually sensitive, gender-sensitive and provided with respect for human rights, to ensure that such services are incorporated into humanitarian needs assessments and humanitarian programmes for preparedness, response and recovery, to meet the needs of all affected populations in humanitarian contexts, and to reinforce local and community-based efforts, which will be all the more important in mitigating and responding to additional psychological consequences experienced in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and calls upon the United Nations and all relevant humanitarian organizations to scale up mental health and psychosocial support capacity accordingly and to report on mental health and psychosocial support programmes and funding in support of the recovery and resilience for the mental health and psychosocial well-being of all those affected, while also recognizing the impacts on humanitarian personnel and volunteers;

Encourages Member States to work towards integrating mental health into primary health care by 2030 as an essential component of universal health coverage, with a view to ensuring that no one is left behind, and to implement measures to promote and improve mental health and well-being, including by scaling up mental health and psychosocial support services;

Calls upon Member States to promote mental health as an essential component of universal health coverage in the context of the high-level meeting on universal health coverage to be held during the seventy-eighth session of the General Assembly;

Also calls upon Member States to promote international cooperation to compile knowledge, experiences and good practices for, and build capacity in, the development, implementation and evaluation of their policies, plans and laws relevant to mental health, including codes of practice and mechanisms related to the protection of human rights and the implementation of legislation, in line with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and other relevant obligations under international law;

Further calls upon Member States to take all the measures necessary to ensure that health workers and mental health professionals provide care and support of the same quality to persons using or seeking to use mental health services, including on the basis of free and informed consent and ensuring respect for their human rights, inherent dignity, individual autonomy and needs through training and the promulgation of ethical standards for public and private health care, and to ensure that, in all fields, including law and health, language, especially in connection with disability and mental health, reflects a human rights model that does not reinforce stigma, prejudice or ableism;

Encourages Member States to scale up efforts to promote the recruitment and retention of competent, skilled and motivated health workers, including community health workers and mental health professionals, and encourage incentives to secure the equitable distribution of qualified health workers, especially in rural, hard-to-reach and underserved areas and in fields with high demands for services, including by providing decent and safe working conditions and appropriate remuneration for health workers working in these areas;

Invites Member States to implement measures to improve mental health and well-being, including by developing comprehensive mental health and psychosocial support services and integrating them into national public health policies;

Urges Member States to address the social, economic and environmental determinants of health, including mental health, and to address holistically the range of barriers arising from underdevelopment, the lack of economic opportunities, inadequate investment, poverty, inequalities and discrimination that impede the full enjoyment of human rights in the context of mental health, recognizing that the approach to mental health systems and services should be widened beyond the biomedical model to include a holistic approach that considers all aspects of a person’s life;

Also urges Member States to adopt prevention strategies to address depression and suicide, in particular among adolescents, for whom suicide is a leading cause of death in the context of mental health, including through public health policies that respect human rights and focus on tackling the social, economic and environmental determinants of mental health, including by enhancing life skills and resilience and promoting social inclusion and healthy relationships;

Urges States to build capacity among health workers and mental health professionals, civil society, including organizations of persons with disabilities, and other key stakeholders in order to strengthen knowledge and skills towards the promotion of laws, policies, services and practices in the area of mental health, in line with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and other relevant obligations under international law;

Encourages Member States to promote the effective, full and meaningful participation of persons with psychosocial disabilities and their representative organizations, as well as those in need of mental health services, in the design, implementation and monitoring of laws, policies, research and programmes relevant to realizing, without discrimination, the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health;

Also encourages Member States to coordinate a multisectoral strategy that aims at promoting mental health for new parents, caregivers, through home- and health facility-based antenatal and postnatal care for new mothers, the provision of early childhood programmes that address the cognitive, sensory-motor and psychosocial development of children and the promotion of healthy child-caregiver relationships, and by introducing or strengthening community protection networks and systems;

Urges Member States to develop universal and targeted school-based programmes to promote mental health and well-being and by integrating mental health services and psychosocial support in schools, including through socioemotional life and skills programmes to counter bullying and violence, both online and offline, and counter stigmatization and discrimination against persons with mental health conditions and psychosocial disabilities;

Also urges Member States to strengthen routine health information systems, data-related capacity and the ability of information systems to integrate mental health into the routine health information system and identify, collate, routinely report and use core mental health data disaggregated by income, gender, age, race, ethnicity, migratory status, disability, geographical location and other characteristics, relevant to national context, and as appropriate, including data on completed and attempted suicides, in order to improve mental health service delivery, promotion and prevention strategies and to consider providing data, as appropriate, for the World Health Organization Global Health Observatory;

Encourages Member States to improve research capacity and academic collaboration on national priorities for research in mental health, in particular operational research with direct relevance to mental health and psychosocial support service development, including the establishment of centres of excellence with clear standards, with the inputs of all relevant stakeholders, including persons with mental health conditions and psychosocial disabilities;

Calls upon Member States to build the knowledge and skills of general and specialized health workers to deliver evidence-based and culturally appropriate mental health and psychosocial support services;

Requests the Secretary-General to provide, in consultation with Member States and in close collaboration with the World Health Organization, other relevant agencies and relevant stakeholders, during the eightieth session of the General Assembly, a progress report on the implementation of the present resolution.