Mental Health Literacy: Strengthening Community Mental Health Through Awareness

ABSTRACT

According to WHO, mental health is the state of a person who realizes his potential, copes with stress factors, is productive and efficient in society, and maintains a state of internal balance (WHO 2012). According to the 2021 data of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), it was found that the number of people diagnosed with major depressive disorder increased by 28.1%, and the number of people diagnosed with anxiety by 27.9% compared to other years in the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic (COVID-19 Mental Disorders Collaborators 2021). According to the health literacy study performed in our country, while 64.6% of the society was found to have a low level of health literacy (Taş ve Akış 2016, Kaya and Karaca Sivrikaya 2019), there was no study revealing the mental health literacy of the society. While there are some studies that reveal the mental health literacy of societies in the international literature (Reavley and Jorm 2011, Gulliver et al. 2017, Ratnayake and Hyde 2019), it is remarkable that there are only a limited number of studies examining the mental health literacy levels of healthcare professionals in our country (Öztaş and Aydoǧan 2021, Çinçinoǧlu and Okanlı 2021). [...]the purpose of this review is to discuss the concept of mental health literacy, its importance, components, interventions to improve it, and what psychiatric nurses can do about it.