COREY KEYES’ MENTAL HEALTH CONTINUUM AND EQUITABLE ACCESS TO SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF MENTAL HEALTH

Abstract

Mental health and substance use disorders have emerged as two of the foremost global health issues post-COVID-19. For instance, the incidences of mental illnesses such as anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, and substance use disorders are becoming prevalent, more burdensome, and unequally distributed worldwide. Even though youth advocates, public and global health professionals, and various government and nongovernment health and social care agencies have promoted social policies to improve the major social determinants of mental health, such as freedom from discrimination and violence, social inclusion, and equitable access to economic resources, mental health and substance use inequity and stigma persist overwhelmingly within families, communities, countries and across regions. This paper posits that while mental health promotion involves shared responsibility, needing the responsive involvement of many health and social sectors, developing and implementing social policies on the structural determinants of the major social determinants of mental health alone may not reduce global mental health and substance abuse inequity and stigmatisation. Therefore, this theory/model paper explored how the use of Corey Keyes’s mental health continuum, which operationalises mental health as a syndrome of symptoms of positive feelings/functioning in life, in addition to the three major social determinants of mental health, might reduce the negative stigmas associated with mental illness and substance use and enhance access to the social determinants of health. Based on the evidence that Keyes’ model not only demonstrates that mental health is a multifaceted state, but also that it is not purely the absence of mental illness symptoms or diagnosis, we concluded that, the model's flourishing with mental illness section presents something positive, which might disabuse the minds of all the stakeholders from either self or public stigmatisation, thereby eliminating one of the major roadblocks for individuals with mental illnesses to equitable access to the major social determinants of mental health.