This year’s World Health Assembly: A Look Ahead

With this year’s World Health Assembly (WHA) just around the corner, we know that the global health funding crisis will take centre stage in WHO and Member State’s discussions. But the 78th WHA is also an important stop on the road to the UN High Level Meeting on NCDs and Mental Health (HLM) scheduled to take place in September in New York, and as such there will be much going on focused around mental health this year.

For UnitedGMH, this means we are mobilising around our four key thematic pillars that are central to the HLM: youth and mental health, suicide prevention, community-based mental health care and the social determinants of mental health. 

So what’s in store at WHA? Co-hosted by the governments of Brazil, Mexico and Portugal, and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), we are hosting a side event  – Mental Health and Human Rights: Towards community-based mental health care – which will not only feature discussions about transitioning to community-based mental health care and the importance of applying a human rights perspective to mental health, but will also spotlight the case for deinstitutionalisation of mental health care (ahead of a new report on this that we launch shortly). 

Another event, in partnership with the Government of South Africa and the Being Learning Network, will involve a deep dive into how to accelerate action and investment in youth mental health.

Additionally, with a focus on suicide prevention and the need for policy and legislative change, we are co-hosting – with the Government of the Netherlands – a session which will include sharing evidence of suicide prevention strategies that have proven successful, as well as tackling decriminalisation of suicide. 

Finally, a session around the Social and Commercial Determinants of Mental Health will be hosted by the Global Mental Health Action Network (GMHAN), World Federation of Public Health Associations, the American Psychological Association, the European Federation of Psychologists Associations, and the Federation of Swiss Psychologists Collaboration in Psychology at the UN. 

Each of these side-events will include people with lived experience, and their voices will inform discussions and deliberations. 

Alongside these events, and various bilateral discussions being set up to help keep our feet to the pedal ahead of the HLM, mental health advocates from 8 countries – from Nigeria to Malaysia, Ukraine to China – will be supported by GMHAN to attend WHA. For many of them, it will be their first time. These advocates will be in Geneva to lead on and contribute to discussions that will affect the process of the drafting of the Political Declaration for the UN HLM, helping to support alignment between Geneva and New York where the HLM will take place. 

Given that the WHA will also see a watershed moment for climate and health – with the adoption of the Global Plan of Action (GPoA) on Climate and Health – we will also be supporting efforts to call for the explicit inclusion of mental health, which is currently missing in the draft GPoA, in order to align with WHO’s own definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being.”

Our approach to this year’s WHA – with increased collaboration across networks, countries, Member States, UN agencies and multilateral organisations – speaks to Helen Keller’s often used quote: 

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”

That is what we aim to do at this year’s WHA.