Brain health is a human right: Implications for policy and research

Abstract

The call to synergize brain health with mental health has major ramifications for research and policy. Mental health has been recognized as a universal human right, but no such declaration exists for brain health. Here, I defend the right to lifelong brain health as a derived, intermediary, and generative right. It is derived from the right to physical health because it is reducible to facts about the health of the body. This grounds brain health in the right to physical health, a long-standing right with hard legal status, while avoiding “rights inflation.” It is intermediary because it bridges the gap between physical and mental health, since the brain is an organ that is central to both physical and mental health. It is generative because it provides impetus to downstream actions including the creation of health-based “neurorights” and bolstering the right to a healthy environment to protect collective cognitive health. Thus, the right to lifelong brain health would guarantee the right of citizens to live and grow in a brain health-promoting environment. A rights-based approach to brain health also has important consequences for research. It would help to move research away from the disease paradigm that focuses on individual risk and responsibility to the study of deeper contributions to brain health and disease through a population neuroscience approach to public brain health. Until the right to brain health is recognized alongside mental health, their synergy will remain incomplete, and brain health promotion will lack unity.