Mental Wellness Initiative

2024 Trends

TREND 1:
Climate Mental Health

‘Climate mental health’ is now a term and has been given recognition and prominence by the prestigious science journal group Nature, which dedicated a special issue of “Nature Mental Health” in March 2024 to this topic. They state: “Climate mental health unifies multidisciplinary approaches, including climate science, psychiatry, and psychology, to inform and shape public policy and action to mitigate the negative effects of climate change on mental health.”  

From climate activism to therapies and wellness journeys designed to mitigate the effects of heat on the body and the mind, an explosion of new perspectives is manifesting, creating new contexts and directions for wellbeing in our fast-changing global environment. The Welcome Trust of the UK, one of the world’s largest medical research funders, launches a global initiative and community in April 2024 to “Help shape a research and action agenda for climate change and mental health.” This is a space to watch closely!  

TREND 2:
Creating a Path

More broadly, the Mental Wellness Initiative members note a mental wellness trend of people seeking alternate, more proactive solutions for learning about and addressing their mental health needs. Not just self-care but engagement with planning and owning a personalized and meaningful path forward through challenges and onwards to resilient wellbeing.  

TREND 3:

Reflecting the World Health Organization’s view that “There is no health without mental health,” trends in legislation and policy are focused on ensuring that mental health needs are given similar priority and coverage to other health needs. Mental health, mental wellness, thriving and flourishing are now front burner topics across the legislative domain and in the health insurance world as well.  

TREND 4:  

Indigenous communities have long been recognized as shouldering a large burden of mental health challenges linked to social and environmental factors as well as to historic displacement. There is now a trend of promoting indigenous healing modalities to improve the mental wellbeing of indigenous peoples, with clear respect and no cultural appropriation tolerated.   

TREND 5:  

While the mental health crisis has been widely recognized among the young, there is an increasing focus on mental wellness and women’s health in midlife. In Canada, for example, this is now being promoted by the banking sector, which is offering webinars around this topic and, more broadly, offering reach-out sessions to all women of all ages and their families.  

TREND 6:  

Spiritual journeys and mental wellness. Wellness travel includes a growing sub-sector of those who seek inner growth and fulfillment by undertaking travel to places of pilgrimage or nature healing. The mission is beyond a wellness holiday and includes a deeper quest for meaning and purpose by immersing in ancient traditions and ways of understanding life and humanity’s place in it.  

TREND 7:  

Social Wellness and Hospitality Design converge to combat the loneliness epidemic. We know that social connectivity is probably the number one factor that contributes to Mental Wellness. This is juxtaposed with the sobering statistics, as the work of the scholar Eric Klinenberg communicates that we are experiencing a massive shift in a large number of people globally living alone for the first time in recorded history. This means that we will have a gradual move away from the isolation of big spaces dedicated to single-use (as in sleeping rooms) towards bigger spaces dedicated to “public” areas where engagement and conversation are invited and promoted. Watch for newly designed environments, with hospitality leading the way, where behavioral “nudging” techniques will intentionally fill a need to promote more social connectivity and combat the loneliness epidemic. 

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