Eric Ip and Trevor Wan et al on Harnessing the power of constitutional rights and legal frameworks to scale up public mental health implementation (The Lancet Psychiatry)

"Harnessing the power of constitutional rights and legal frameworks to scale up public mental health implementation"
Michael Ni, Candi Leung, Trevor Wan, Jonathan Campion, Neeraj Gill, Sandro Galea, Eric Ip
The Lancet Psychiatry
Published online: February 2026

Summary: Despite the existence of effective public mental health interventions, global coverage remains low. Only a minority of people with mental disorders receive treatment, far fewer receive interventions to address or prevent the associated impacts of mental disorders, and there is negligible coverage of interventions to prevent mental disorders or promote mental wellbeing and resilience. This implementation failure breaches the right to health and statutory legislation in some countries and results in population-scale preventable suffering, broad societal and individual impacts, and associated economic costs. Various reasons account for public mental health implementation failure, including insufficient policy and implementation according to population needs, and insufficient knowledge, resource, political will, and legal protection regarding the right to mental health. This Health Policy highlights a further reason for implementation failure is that only 12% of constitutions covering 3·5% of the world's population explicitly recognise a constitutional right to mental health, compared with 70% of constitutions recognising a constitutional right to health or physical health. A legal framework that includes explicit constitutional protection for mental health would mean the right to mental health would supersede all other laws. This would thereby provide a basis for legislation and support legal opportunities to challenge, advocate, and improve effective public mental health implementation by different sectors. This framework and associated opportunities would support the scale-up of implementation of cross-sector policy based on the public mental health needs of a population. Such a holistic, coordinated legal approach would support scaled-up coverage of public mental health interventions to treat and prevent mental disorders and promote mental wellbeing and resilience, as well as action to address inequities and protect the rights of those with mental disorders. Improved implementation would result in broad impacts across different sectors and associated economic benefits.