Recently, mental health policies have been shifting away from a focus on treating individuals with mental illnesses toward expanding comprehensive mental health and welfare services for the entire population. This reflects changes in domestic and international policy trends and demands, representing a transition toward recognizing mental health as a societal issue and encompassing a service spectrum that includes prevention, early intervention, treatment, recovery, and self-reliance support.
Accordingly, securing the workforce, enhancing their capacity, and establishing a protection system for providing mental health and welfare services have emerged as critical national tasks. However, domestic workforce policies still heavily rely on the training system for mental health professionals, and systems for assessing the scale of the field workforce, improving working conditions, and supporting capacity building remain insufficient. Consequently, this is highly likely to limit the scalability, accessibility, and quality of mental health and welfare services.
Therefore, this study aims to analyze the workforce policies of major foreign countries, comprehensively diagnose the issues within the current domestic situation, and derive improvement tasks for mental health and welfare service workforce policies that are suited to the context of South Korea.