Mental health: today is World Mental Health Day – social media campaign for young people

World Mental Health Day, organised by the World Health Organisation on 10 October, is an opportunity to promote inclusive social and health policies that are accessible to all, as well as to combat stigma. This year, the day takes on even greater significance through its official theme: ‘Listening to lived experiences: real voices, real change’. This focus calls on institutions and the scientific community to fulfil a specific duty: to place the individual and their lived experience at the centre of care pathways. For the WHO, these experiences constitute an essential form of knowledge – complementary to professional and scientific expertise – which can help to identify critical issues in access to care, obstacles in care pathways and needs that are not adequately recognised.

However, data from the WHO Mental Health Atlas 2024 show that there is still a long way to go in establishing an appropriate approach to mental health and promoting the effective participation of patients in policy-making, service design, implementation and the monitoring of outcomes. Among the countries that responded to the survey, 45 per cent stated that they collaborate on a regular basis with patient organisations, 37 per cent have involved them in the training of primary healthcare professionals, whilst 59 per cent reported having developed mental health legislation through consultation processes. This figure rises to 80 per cent among countries with a national mental health policy or plan.

The data therefore highlight the need to strengthen forms of ongoing participation that can have a tangible impact on decision-making.

And in Italy? There are over 845,000 patients receiving care from Mental Health Departments (DSM), with recent estimates putting the figure at over a million when private care and new cases are also taken into account; of these, around 56 per cent are women. This figure has been rising in recent years, particularly amongst young people, with digital technologies identified as one of the main culprits: according to a study published in *The Lancet*, spending more than two hours a day in front of screens could be associated, globally, with the loss of around 2.8 million healthy life years due to depression. Social media is both a contributing factor and a reflection of this distress: in the first six months of 2026, there were over 138,000 posts on mental health, and the word ‘anxiety’ was the most frequently used term with around 37,000 mentions – used approximately 13 times more often than ‘depression’.

The trend remains the same when we look at the wider global picture. From 1990 to 2023, again according to data reported by *The Lancet*, the number of people with mental health problems has almost doubled worldwide, reaching 1.17 billion cases. “If we were to relate this to the Italian population,” explains the director of the Mental Health Department at ASL RM2, Massimo Cozza, “it would affect around 8 million people.” Many of these people, however, do not receive the care they need, or can only access it by paying out of their own pockets. According to the Ministry of Health’s report, in 2024 public services assisted 845,516 adults – far fewer, therefore, than the number of people potentially affected. Furthermore, care is unevenly distributed. A report by the Italian Society of Psychiatric Epidemiology (SIEP) compares the regions using 14 indicators, including per capita expenditure: 37 euros per year in Campania and 115 in Bolzano, compared with a national average of 75.