Provided by David Satcher, M.D., Ph.D.
Surgeon General of the United States of America
Chapter 1
Overarching Themes
Mental Health and
Mental Illness: A Public Health Approach
Overarching Themes
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.
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