Families and Mental Health

"This book is about a comprehensive lecture onfamilies and mental health that everybody should read. A significant part of our children’s lives where we, as parents, can help them thrive is in the area of mental health. Mental health connects with every other component of our health, including our emotional, relational, physical, and spiritual health. Each of these has a profound impact on the other. If one is out of balance, our children’s mental health can tip off-center. Therefore, we must work to keep each of these components in our children’s lives in balance. Mental, social, and behavioural health problems may interact to intensify their effects on behaviour and well-being. Substance abuse, violence, and abuses of women and children on the one hand, and health problems such as heart disease, depression, and anxiety on the other, are more prevalent and more difficult to cope with in conditions of high unemployment, low income, limited education, stressful work conditions, gender discrimination, unhealthy lifestyle, and human rights violations. Mental health can be enhanced by effective public health interventions. The improvement in heart health in several countries has had more to do with attention to environment, tobacco, and nutrition policies than with specific medicines or treatment techniques. The malign effects of changing environmental conditions on heart health have been reversed to varying extents by actions at multiple levels. "