Mental health, WHO: few countries have completed the transition to community-based care

On the occasion of World Mental Health Day, the World Health Organization published a framework measuring how much national health systems have actually moved from an institution-centred model of psychiatric care to one based on community services. The result: only 9% of countries have completed this transition, while 53% are still in the early stages of the process. WHO’s 2026 campaign, titled “Lived experiences heard: real voices, real change”, calls for directly involving people with first-hand experience of mental disorders in decisions about services.

Within the same context, but as a separate piece of research, WHO Europe published a study that for the first time measures, in a comparable way across many European countries, nine types of adverse childhood experiences. Among young people who reported having had four or more of these experiences, 76.3% said they had needed professional psychological support in the past year, compared with 36.7% of those who had not had such experiences. Mark Bellis, professor at Liverpool John Moores University, pointed out that this is the first time childhood adversities have been measured in a comparable way across such a large number of European countries.

The study, in the available material, does not specify the size of the national samples or the methodological design used to make the data comparable across different countries: the gap between 76.3% and 36.7% describes a statistical association between adverse childhood experiences and a reported need for psychological support, not a demonstrated cause-and-effect relationship.

The two sets of data — the slow transition of health systems towards community-based care and the link found between adverse childhood experiences and the need for psychological support — are published by WHO on the same day dedicated to mental health, without the organization presenting them as connected to one another.