Mental Health and Mental Illness: A Public Health Approach

The Nation’s contemporary mental health enterprise, like the broader field of health, is rooted in a population-based public health model. The public health model is characterized by concern for the health of a population in its entirety and by awareness of the linkage between health and the physical and psycho- social environment. Public health focuses not only on traditional areas of diagnosis, treatment, and etiology, but also on epidemiologic surveillance of the health of the population at large, health promotion, disease prevention, and access to and evaluation of services (Last & Wallace, 1992).

Just as the mainstream of public health takes a broad view of health and illness, this Surgeon General's Report on Mental Health takes a wide-angle lens to both mental health and mental illness. In years past, the mental health field often focused principally on mental illness in order to serve individuals who were most severely affected. Only as the field has matured has it begun to respond to intensifying interest and concerns about disease prevention and health promotion. Because of the more recent consideration of these topic areas, the body of accumulated knowledge regarding them is not as expansive as that for mental illness.