Newsletter Edition #394 [The Files In-Depth]
Readers,
In the ongoing heat and dust from the restructuring of global health, mental health is often clouded out from the consideration it requires. While there has been an evolution of how much bandwidth mental health receives, it is still far from the needs of those who need support.
In today's edition, we bring you a thoughtful examination on the custodianship in mental health. This pieces considers how authority and responsibility are distributed across the institutions, and actors involved in shaping the global mental health agenda.
The author of today's essay, Deena Mehjabeen, lays out the various actors involved in shaping and developing priorities for mental health; how existing processes and politics influence the agenda; and what is needed to clarify responsibilities, and advance accountability of the actors involved.
Mehjabeen is a Bangladeshi public health scholar based in Australia. She is a part of our annual fellowship program this year.
I found this meta-analysis on the governance of mental health to be illuminating. We hope you find this useful too.
Thank you for reading.
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Best,
Priti
Priti Patnaik, Founder & Publisher, Geneva Health Files
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ANALYSIS
Who Holds The Custodianship of Global Mental Health?
Deena Mehjabeen
Mehjabeen is a public health researcher working on mental health, migration, and health equity. She is a 2026 Geneva Health Files Fellow.
Email: mehjabeen.deena@yahoo.com
Mental health is receiving increasing attention in global health policy. At the World Health Assembly (WHA), it is increasingly discussed alongside universal health coverage, health-system strengthening, noncommunicable diseases and broader questions of health and wellbeing. The 2025 United Nations High-Level Meeting on noncommunicable diseases and mental health further reflected this growing political attention, while discussions at the 2026 World Health Assembly continued to consider mental health within broader health-system and intersectoral agendas.
Yet less examined is how these priorities are set and who holds influence over the direction of global mental health. As mental health becomes more firmly embedded within global health policy, the question of custodianship becomes increasingly important: how authority and responsibility are distributed across the institutions and actors involved in shaping the global mental health agenda. This piece will examine these dynamics through the lens of custodianship in global mental health governance.
The evolving global mental health agenda
Mental health has been recognised as an important component of global health for decades, but the scale and visibility of the issue have increased substantially. The World Mental Health Report: Transforming Mental Health for All led by the World Health Organization (WHO) highlights the substantial gap between mental health needs and existing responses; calls for transformation across policies; and, systems and services.
The WHO Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan 2013–2030 similarly places leadership and governance alongside service delivery, promotion and prevention, and information and research as key areas for action. These frameworks provide an important foundation for understanding the direction of global mental health policy, while also drawing attention to the governance arrangements through which these priorities are developed and implemented. Recent developments provide a timely context for examining these processes.
The 2025 UN High-Level Meeting on NCDs and mental health marked a significant moment for the growing prominence of mental health within the global health agenda. The resulting political declaration placed mental health and wellbeing within a broader global political commitment on NCDs.
The issue has continued to feature within World Health Assembly discussions.
The WHA78 proceedings provide a record of recent decisions and discussions concerning mental health, while the WHA79 proceedings provide a more recent view of how mental health is being positioned within the global health agenda.
At WHA79 in May 2026, a strategic roundtable on an integrated and intersectoral response to NCDs and mental health brought together delegates, WHO experts, partner agencies and civil society to discuss policy, financing and health-system responses. These developments demonstrate the growing political and policy attention to mental health at the global level, while also providing an opportunity to examine the structures and actors through which these priorities are established.
