ABSTRACT
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development signals an ambitious political commitment towards transforming our world into a more just, peaceful and inclusive global community. This chapter explores the importance of the consensus that mental health is a human development imperative, in addition to the need for scaled-up investments to promote health and wellbeing for all. It focuses on where this consensus fractures, using human rights, including the right to health, both to locate the debates on closing the mental health treatment gap, and to contextualise the urgent need to address the current systemic human rights crisis of contemporary mental health care. The chapter argues that the dominant biomedical model is no longer compliant with the right to health, examining how the evolving normative, social and scientific landscape demands a paradigm shift to uphold international legal obligations, strengthen the practice of medicine, and improve health and wellbeing.
