Background:
Mental health literacy covers knowledge and beliefs about mental disorders that aid the recognition, management or prevention of these disorders. This paper describes how a research program on mental health literacy started and how new directions evolved.
Method:
Historical overview.
Results:
The talk looks at the evolution of two strands of work. The first involves monitoring mental health literacy at a national level. This work initially showed poor recognition of disorders and beliefs about treatment that diverged greatly from those of mental health professionals. Subsequent work showed major improvements in Australia over quite a short historical period that was partly because of planned intervention. The second strand involves the development of Mental Health First Aid as an intervention to improve mental health literacy. This started as a small-scale local activity but has rapidly spread across Australia and to seven other countries. Finally, the talk examines the future directions that work on mental health literacy might take.
Conclusion:
Research in this area has consisted of largely unplanned and serendipitous starts in new directions, which were followed by more stable periods of planned research activity.
