Developing and Using Social Capital In Public Mental Health

Social capital has played a prominent role in recent initiatives to improve mental health and enhance the quality of services. However, efforts to substantiate a link between social capital and mental health have been daunted by equivocal findings and conceptual confusion. These consequences are in part due to having two prominent approaches that offer disparate and inconsistent accounts about what comprises social capital, how to increase it and how to use it to benefit mental health policy and practice. This paper lays the groundwork for a rapprochement.