Reframing Welfare States Through the Social Determinants of Mental Health: A Holistic Well-being Perspective
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29070/d94w5a34Keywords:
welfare states, social determinants of mental health, holistic well-being, social policy, higher education, capabilities approachAbstract
Mental health has emerged as one of the most pressing challenges confronting contemporary societies; yet dominant policy frameworks continue to treat it predominantly as an individual, biomedical concern rather than as a systemic outcome shaped by social, economic, and political conditions. This paper argues that welfare state architectures must be fundamentally reconceptualised through the lens of the social determinants of mental health (SDMH) in order to adequately address the mounting global burden of psychological distress. Drawing on a comparative conceptual analysis of liberal, conservative, and social democratic welfare regime typologies, the paper examines how structural features of welfare states — including income redistribution, social protection floors, labour market regulation, housing provision, and access to higher education — mediate mental health outcomes across populations. Grounded in a holistic well-being theoretical framework that integrates Amartya Sen's capabilities approach, the World Health Organization's social determinants model, and critical social policy theory, the paper contends that mental health cannot be decoupled from the broader configuration of social rights and welfare provisioning. Particular attention is paid to the higher education context, where precarious student and faculty conditions intersect with structural inequalities to generate distinctive mental health vulnerabilities. The paper advances four principal policy recommendations: the adoption of mental health equity audits within welfare reform processes; the institutionalisation of universal psychosocial support as a social right; the integration of SDMH indicators into higher education quality assurance frameworks; and the recalibration of austerity-era social spending to reflect mental health as a public good. The paper concludes that the reframing of welfare states as mental health-enabling institutions is not merely a policy aspiration but a normative and empirical imperative for holistic human development.
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