18.1.1  What are we trying to achieve?

By raising awareness about mental health and illness, we are trying to achieve the following goals:

• Mental health promotion and primary prevention. By mental health promotion we mean educating people about ways to improve their mental health. In primary prevention, the aim is to prevent a person from developing a mental illness in the first place. The strategies for improving mental health and avoiding mental illness are similar, so we will group them together.
• Secondary prevention means detecting mental illness as quickly as possible so that the person can receive treatment before the illness progresses.
• Tertiary prevention means trying to reduce some of the negative effects of a mental illness that has already developed.

In the following sections these promotion and prevention activities will be discussed in more detail.