215 | Shifting from Psychotherapy to Population Mental Health: A New Paradigm for Community Change

There will be too few practitioners to meet future needs for mental health treatment. Shifting from psychotherapy to population mental health involves moving from individualized treatment to broader, preventive strategies that address mental health needs early, aiming to improve well-being across entire communities rather than focusing solely on individual therapy.   The American Psychological Association has recommended this shift from individual-focused therapy to system-based approach to mental health (Dodge et al., 2024), aiming to address potential issues early and prevent the need for intensive therapy. In this workshop, psychologists, mental health professionals, medical professionals, and ministry leaders will describe the reasons for and barriers to this shift, focusing on how to adapt treatment from an individual to a population-level framework. As an example, a forgiveness intervention that was implemented at a secular Colombian university, involving two thousand eight hundred seventy-eight participants (students, staff and faculty) from a community over ten thousand will be analyzed as a pilot project for this type of shift (Ortega Bechara et al., 2024). This initiative demonstrated effectiveness, and the research identified which of sixteen activities were most associated with improvements in forgiveness, depression, anxiety, and flourishing. Participants will distinguish how to create public campaigns to promote better mental health, using forgiveness as a concrete example, without disrupting clinical practice. Additionally, ten lessons from the research will be shared to help employ forgiveness-promoting strategies for effective population-level interventions.