Introduction

Mental health disorders represent one of the most common problems facing adults: within a twelve-month period nearly 30 per cent of the population experiences some diagnosable mental health disorder. Mental health disorders pose an enormous emotional burden for the individuals suffering from them, as well as an economic burden for society, especially in terms of the incapacity to work. For instance, in the year 2000 in England alone, the total cost of adult depression amounted to over £9 billion of which £370 million represent direct treatment costs and more than £8 billion represent costs due to lost working days. Clinical psychologists are concerned with analysing the causes of mental problems from which people may suffer, and with helping people to deal with such problems. Mental health problems are of interest to social psychologists as well. Mental health problems are to an important extent rooted in how individuals perceive their social world, and in how individuals function in their interpersonal relationships. For example, depressed people are often socially isolated, which makes current work in social psychology on the ‘need to belong’ directly relevant to understanding depression (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). It is, of course, not possible to describe everything that social psychologists do in the field of mental health in just one chapter. Therefore, this chapter focuses on three mental health problems: a disturbed body image, depression and relationship problems.