Beyond awareness: mental health promotion requires epistemic diversity, not pathologization

Public mental health has become an increasing concern over recent decades, accompanied by a rapid expansion of public awareness campaigns aimed at improving population mental well-being. We argue that while psychiatric interpretations of distress promoted by these campaigns may be beneficial for individuals with clinically significant mental disorders, emerging evidence suggests that the same interpretations may have unintended adverse effects among psychologically healthy individuals. We argue that empirical support for the effectiveness of universal mental health awareness campaigns remains limited and that their benefits are frequently overstated due to selective or overly generalized interpretations of existing studies. We propose that effective mental health promotion should move beyond uniform messaging toward individualized approaches that foster flexibility in how distress is understood and managed. Finally, we suggest that mathematical modelling and artificial intelligence offer promising technical tools for designing such adaptive, individualized mental health promotion strategies, and provide an example of the latter.