Positive mental health: between well-being and capacity development

Abstract

The efforts of the World Health Organization to transcend biomedical and behavioral explanations of health have highlighted well-being as a key element in this task. The inclusion of well-being concept in mental health definitions has caused, on many occasions, the use of both concepts as synonyms, however, well-being cannot hardly define by its own a person's mental health. This article aims to introduce the concept of capacity from the field of human development as a response to the limitations presented by well-being models and the contributions that their implementation would have in the construction of a definition for mental health from the socioeconomic approach and consolidate a strategy to promote mental health.