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Mental health promotion is a relatively new, evolving and very exciting area of public health. The challenge for mental health promotion in Australia is ‘weaving its many threads’ through the various areas of mental health policy, programs and service delivery.

This paper identifies seven points in favour of integrating mental health promotion and general health promotion strategies: mental, physical and social aspects of health are inextricably inter‐linked; mental health is all too easily overlooked in thought and deed; life circumstances affect mental, social and physical health; mental, social and physical health have intertwined and shared roots; we need concerted action on these intertwined and shared roots; even topic‐specific action needs to be co‐ordinated and the promotion of mental health is a foundation for the promotion of general health. Attention is then focused on how such integration can be achieved, with reference to the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion and the ‘arenas’ approach to programmes. The paper concludes by widening out the notion of integration to that of health promotion as an integral part of our collective way of life, advocating the idea of ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body in a healthy society’.

This article suggests some dilemmas in producing local mental health promotion strategies, as experienced by a mental health promotion specialist in England. It argues that, because of the misconceptions and misunderstandings associated with mental health and mental health promotion (MHP), some groundwork is needed to communicate a common and clear understanding. The author explains how she has communicated MHP among organisations in her locality. This includes exploring definitions of mental health and its relationship to mental illness, the rationale and effectiveness of promoting mental health and the use of a framework to plan or assess mental health promotion.

Taking the principles of health promotion as a starting point, this paper begins with a review of the ways in which mental health has been defined in the mental health promotion literature. In order to move beyond definitions that revolve only around the absence of illness or reductionist lists of individual skills and attributes, it then introduces a model derived from health promotion theory. Finally, the paper concludes with an example of the model's application to promoting the well‐being of mental health service users through the provision of evidence‐based employment support.

These are exciting times for prevention and promotion in mental health at the European level, writes Eva Jané‐Llopis. We have a European Commission mental health green paper; we also have WHO commitment to support member states to develop mental health policies and put them into practice. But support and engagement from practitioners and policy makers will be crucial to take forward mental health promotion on the ground, and a greater focus is needed on evidence based interventions and the evaluation of programmes and practice if the momentum is to be sustained.

The aim of this study is to analyse the position and role of mental health in health promotion policy. Policy documents from Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, England and Portugal indicate that, although mental health is considered a serious issue, it is problematic in policy terms. A range of arguments are put forward, making the case for the importance of mental health within the health promotion agenda, including the classification of mental illness as a public health problem, socio‐economic and individual costs of mental health problems and the view that mental well‐being is a crucial element of overall health. However problems of definition, measurement and a traditional focus on treatment and care continue to make mental health promotion problematic for policy makers.

This paper is about a single case study of a three-year BSc Mental Health Nursing degree programme based at a London University. The purpose of the paper is to evaluate the extent to which the programme sufficiently addresses the ten quality criteria developed by the “PROMISE” (2009) Mental Health Promotion Project. PROMISE (2009) is a European public health project funded by the European Commission and was conducted from 2009 to 2012. Its aim was the European-wide development of criteria and training guidelines in mental health promotion and recommended these should be integrated into the professional training curricula of nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers.

A content analysis method (Bryman, 2012) was used for this case study. This method allowed for a line-by-line scrutiny of the contents of the curriculum for evidence of the ten PROMISE quality criteria for mental health promotion (PROMISE project; http://promise-mental-health.com/training-guidelines.html).

The findings revealed that the PROMISE (2009) project was not one of the four key documents stated as forming the basis for the design of the curriculum content. However, the study found evidence of the curriculum addressing the first PROMISE criterion of embracing the principles of mental health promotion in seven of the 14 modules (50 per cent) in the programme. In the first year of the programme five of the ten PROMISE quality criteria were embedded in two of the four modules. In year 2, quality criteria 1, 4 and 7 were addressed in the course content of four of the five modules (see Table I). In the final year of the programme PROMISE quality criteria 1, 2, 4 and 8 were embedded in the syllabus and assessment strategy in two out of the five final year modules. It was also found that quality criteria 2 and 9 were not included in any of the modules in the programme.

This is a case study based on the content analysis of a single curriculum document in a London University. It is therefore not possible to make wide generalisation of its findings across the countries involved in the EU Promise project. However, it could be argued that it is possible to find a number of the key findings present in other UK University programmes that may be similar in structure to that selected for this study. The other limitation to this content analysis is that the evaluation process did not include accounts of the students’ experience on the programme. This could have contributed significantly to the outcome of the evaluation exercise. Although the methodology used is simple, practical and relatively sound, it is not necessarily rigorous in terms of quantitative research methodology but arguably an acceptable contribution to the spectrum within qualitative research paradigm.

The emergence of the “PROMISE” criteria especially on a European-wide basis puts emphasis on the importance of mental health promotion in the training of health care professionals. This is expected to be achieved by the training institutions in the European Union. In the UK, this notion is well embraced in various health policy documents (e.g. “No Health Without Mental Health” DH 2011). In the case of the programme examined at one London University, work is required to ensure that a pervasive incorporation of mental health promotion strategies in the curriculum in order to help the students to become better equipped to understand and effectively apply the mental health promotion criteria in their work upon qualification.

This is one of the first papers to address the “PROMISE” project and the issue of incorporating mental health promotion criteria in a pre-registration mental health pathway training programme in a university in the UK.

The importance of mental health promotion is increasingly being recognised as a policy issue in the UK, although little is known yet about progress towards implementing mental health promotion approaches within mental health services. This paper presents an overview of the topic, and reports on a survey of local authorities in England to identify examples of good practice in mental health promotion and the extent to which they are underpinned by evidence.