Vaasa Excellence Centre for Mental Health

The Vaasa Excellence Centre for Mental Health collaborates with the other regional mental health projects by organizing seminars, research meetings and other events relating to mental health.

Why establish an Excellence Centre for Mental Health?

Mental disorders constitute a major public health threat. In Finland, mental disorders are the most common cause for premature retirement. The physical health of Finns has improved but a corresponding improvement in the mental health remains to be achieved. The shake-up of the mental health care has to start with mental health promotion and prevention as well as aggregating the service system and standardizing the treatment chains. At the moment mental health services are divided to primary health care, special health care and social services. Nationally and internationally there have been observations that special problems like a lack of continuity in treatment chains and service gaps occur in fragmented, psychosocial service systems.

The up-coming municipality and service structure reform gives us a chance to aggregate and to develop the fragmented mental health services. This can only be done by assuring that the population base is sufficient enough to ensure the required and modern specialized mental health services. Community-based mental health care is more cost-effective and has more positive outcomes such as better quality of life than psychiatric in-hospital care. To allocate the mental health services in a way that is functional and customer-oriented requires that the development of mental health care be based on versatile, extensive and valid research outcomes.