Health promotion and mental illness—an overview

Abstract

Mental illness carries with it a wide range of burdens. The extent to which health promotion is an additional issue has been poorly documented. An expert group was set up to explore ‘Health Promotion and Mental Illness’ under a Health Education Authority Initiative in order to provide strategy guidance on future health promotion priorities. This special section contains a selection of contributions from a variety of perspectives. If this difficult to reach population is to receive informed targeting, it is important that a review is carried out to evaluate the efficacy of any interventions to date, to explore relevant theory and how it could be applied in this area and to understand the needs of this group. As such it presents a substantial challenge.