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Friday, 10 October 2025
NOTE TO JOURNALISTS
World Mental Health Day 2025
World Mental Health Day serves as a powerful reminder that there is no health without mental health. This year’s campaign focuses on the urgent need to support the mental health and psychosocial needs of people affected by humanitarian emergencies.
Here are some resources to support your coverage of the day, and the wider topic of mental health in emergencies:
Mental health in emergencies: a lifeline, not a luxury [https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/mental-health-in-emergencies–a-lifeline–not-a-luxury]
In this statement, Dr Dévora Kestel, Director a.i. of the WHO Department of Noncommunicable Diseases and Mental Health reminds that mental health support is a critical component of emergency response, not an optional add-on. In crisis settings, over 67 million people are affected by mental health conditions, yet services remain underfunded and inaccessible for many. WHO calls for urgent investment in mental health preparedness and integrated care, emphasizing that protecting mental well-being is essential to saving lives and restoring dignity in emergencies.
World Mental Health Day campaign [https://www.who.int/campaigns/world-mental-health-day/2025]
The campaign page provides a background for the chosen theme – mental health in humanitarian emergencies – and offers a wide array of resources, including the campaign’s key messaging, assets and materials, publications and videos.
Healing hands – hurting minds – landmark new survey of the mental health and wellbeing of doctors and nurses in Europe [https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/10-10-2025-healing-hands—hurting-minds]
Doctors and nurses in Europe are working in conditions that harm their mental health and well-being, with a worrying proportion experiencing passive suicidal thoughts or thoughts of hurting themselves. That is the key finding of a landmark new WHO/Europe survey released today on World Mental Health Day.
The Mental Health of Nurses and Doctors (MeND) survey is the largest to date, with over 90, 000 responses collected and analysed from all 27 countries of the European Union, plus Iceland and Norway. The findings, including country breakdowns, reveal the true cost of years of underinvestment in Europe’s health systems and health workforce.
Briefing at the UN Geneva by Dr Fahmy Hanna, WHO Technical Officer for mental health
Dr Fahmy spoke to the journalists at UN Geneva’s briefing today (10 October). You can download the clip [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xYr0uS2ox4wXkGwIoNLwxbd2BG6b6Ehx/view?usp=sharing] of his intervention here; the entire briefing is available here [https://webtv.un.org/en/asset/k1d/k1d19uvf8b].
Dr Fahmy said: “Today’s theme is simple and urgent. The world faces not only unprecedented humanitarian crises but an unprecedented mental health crisis. Every emergency has two faces: one in shattered infrastructure—hospitals, schools, homes—and the other in disrupted lives. We must respond to both.
One in five people in emergencies lives with a mental health condition—yet mental health support is still treated, in too many responses, as optional. Today, an estimated 67 million people with mental disorders are living in conflict, disaster, or displacement settings. Their needs are not marginal; they are among those most affected.
Coordination is possible and progress is real. In 2019, fewer than half of emergencies had an MHPSS coordination mechanism; today it is 71%—proof that when we invest, people receive coordinated care and better referrals. Eighty-five percent of emergencies now report providing mental health support—but service coverage and quality still fall short. Mental health workers are often among the first to listen and the last to leave; like other frontline staff, they need protection, supportive supervision, and time for self-care.
WHO is supporting mental health in 40+ emergencies today, backed by a global inter-agency surge roster of 600 specialists. The IASC MHPSS Minimum Service Package (MSP) sets the global standard for rapid, coordinated action across sectors in all emergencies.
In 2024, WHO provided life-saving psychotropic medicines to 2.1 million people with severe mental illness in conflict settings such as Sudan, Chad, and Ethiopia, and helped rebuild systems in Myanmar, Syria, and Lebanon. Yet in early 2025, country requests for these essential medicines dropped by 94% as international funds vanished—leaving people with severe conditions, in the middle of crisis, without support. When humanitarian funding disappears, the impact is immediate and immense.
In 2024, Member States unanimously adopted a milestone resolution at the World Health Assembly—the first in history to call for MHPSS across preparedness, response, and recovery. This is a turning point—but only if we choose to act on it, together.
The most powerful aid can be a safe place to tell your story. The most common condition in an emergency is not a physical wound, but grief. A broken bone may heal in weeks; a destroyed home can be rebuilt in months; but the mental health effects, if ignored, can last a lifetime. People cannot survive on food, water, and shelter alone. With mental health and psychosocial support, people can cope, recover, heal, and rebuild.
Access turns a number into a neighbor: a parent who sleeps again, a child back in class, a responder who can keep serving. Measure success by who finds care, not by what we pledged.
To responders: integrate mental health into operations. To governments: invest in preparedness—it pays back in wellbeing and economic recovery. To donors: resource MHPSS as a life-saving measure.
WHO’s WMHD page today features resources—social media assets, videos, and feature stories from the front lines in oPt, Afghanistan, Syria, and Myanmar—showcasing colleagues investing in MHPSS in some of the most difficult contexts.
Let’s ensure together that we renew commitment together for the value of mental health.”
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