The world is in the middle of a quiet but consequential shift.
Over the past decades, mental health discourse and priorities have gradually shifted to a rights-based approach. Human rights frameworks like the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) have fundamentally reoriented how we think about mental health. More so, as a rights issue to be addressed.
However, this shift looks different on the ground.
Some nations are drafting mental health legislation for the very first time. Others are trying to reconcile older laws with newer human rights frameworks. Many countries have strong legal-policy frameworks but weak implementation. Others are still navigating what rights-based care looks like within their own cultural, social, and political systems. There is no single trajectory nor a universal template. What works in one context must be understood and adapted to work in another.
For too long, relevant mental health laws, policies, and strategies have remained difficult to locate. They are highly dispersed and inaccessible, which inhibits evidence-informed reform or cross-country learning.
This is the defining challenge of global mental health policy today: how do we build pathways that are both internationally grounded and locally responsive? How do countries at different stages of reform learn from each other without losing sight of their own contexts, their cultures, their systems, and their lived realities?
And more practically, where does one even begin to look?
MiNDbank seeks to address this concern.
The fragmentation problem
Governments are, through concerted deliberation and documentation, reforming their mental health policies, laws, and service standards. What is short, however, is consolidated and accessible information for those who may not know where to begin.
A civil society advocate in one country trying to make the case for reform cannot easily find out how another country approached the same issue or what the World Health Organization’s latest guidance recommends. A lived experience advocate sees that policies, legal standards, and human rights frameworks from other countries that would sharpen their advocacy are not easy to locate. A researcher conducting a cross-country analysis spends weeks tracking primary sources across ministry websites, portals, and academic repositories, many of which are outdated, untranslated, or simply inaccessible. A government official looking to integrate evidence-based programs into mental health policy has no straightforward way to identify countries in similar contexts that have implemented such programs effectively.
The fragmentation of this information is not a minor inconvenience. It slows reform and hinders advocacy, creating gaps that distance policy intent from on-ground action.
MiNDbank bridges this gap by enabling national and regional knowledge exchange.
The platform
MiNDbank is a global online platform hosted by the Centre for Mental Health Law & Policy, ILS, Pune. It is a one-stop repository of law and policy resources for mental health, substance use, and suicide prevention. It has been developed with a clear purpose: bringing this information together in one place. Primarily, it aims to:
- Facilitate global knowledge exchange of key resources and best practices to improve policy development across countries.
- Advocate for the adoption of rights-based policies that protect and promote mental health.
- Support policy research to inform effective mental health legislation, governance, and systems strengthening.
The platform in practice and who it is for
At its core, MiNDbank is a single point of access to key resources across 190 countries – laws, policies, service standards, evaluations, and key WHO and UN resources, all in one searchable platform. Whether one is looking for what a specific country currently has in place or trying to understand how multiple countries have approached the same legislative challenge, the database is built to make that search straightforward.
Users can move between country-specific resources and international frameworks, seeing what policies exist and how they measure up against the UNCRPD and other human rights instruments. The database aims to help users in accessing, understanding, and citing country-specific resources, and take it a step further if they wish to compare cross-country documents.
Reflecting on its journey, Michelle Funk and Natalie Drew of the World Health Organization, who originally established MiNDbank, shared:
“The World Health Organization (WHO) MiNDbank was established as a global online platform providing a single point of access to comprehensive resources on mental health, substance use, disability, general health, human rights, and development. By consolidating national and international policies, laws, service standards, evaluations, and key WHO and UN resources, MiNDbank has helped reduce fragmentation, facilitate the sharing of knowledge across countries, and support policy reform, research, advocacy, training, and clinical practice.
The WHO MiNDbank has been widely used by policymakers and planners, legislators, civil society organizations, researchers, clinicians, and human rights mechanisms as a reliable and accessible source of information to inform decision-making and promote more inclusive, rights-based approaches to health and development.
We would like to express our sincere appreciation to the Centre for Mental Health Law and Policy for accepting responsibility for the future stewardship of MiNDbank. We are delighted to hand over the MiNDbank into its capable hands and are confident that it will ensure the platform remains up to date, accessible, and available to countries and stakeholders around the world.”
The way forward
The shift towards rights-based mental health care is ongoing, but it is uneven. Countries are at different stages of this journey, working with differing social, systemic and cultural contexts. And what can help is access to how others have navigated it. Platforms like MiNDbank help bring coherence to a fragmented knowledge landscape, making it easier for countries and stakeholders to find, interpret, and act on evidence more effectively.
In this spirit, we welcome contributions through resources to the MiNDbank database. If you work in mental health systems, policy, advocacy, research, or lived experience networks, we invite you to contribute relevant resources to MiNDbank from your country or internationally. Please share them through this submission form or by emailing us at imho@cmhlp.org.
Policy and systemic change are inherently complex. Informed stakeholders can support policy shifts that transform the mental health and well-being of their communities.
Keeping this in mind, MiNDbank is developed to close the gap between policy and practice. To explore the database and learn more, visit https://mindbank.cmhlp.org/.
