Mental Health Literacy: integrating bibliometric, scientometric, thematic, and meta-analytic perspectives

Background Mental Health Literacy is increasingly recognized as a key determinant of mental health promotion, yet the field is conceptually fragmented and dominated by diverse, sometimes weak, measurement practices.Methods This review used a mixed-methods design to clarify the structure, content, and empirical foundations of Mental Health Literacy. First, a bibliometric and scientometric analysis of 1,580 records from Web of Science and Scopus mapped growth, authorship, sources, and collaboration patterns. Second, thematic analyses of key clusters examined how Mental Health Literacy is defined, operationalized, and critiqued in different research traditions. Third, a psychometric meta-analysis synthesized 12 studies using the original 35-item Mental Health Literacy Scale, pooling means, standard deviations, and heterogeneity across linguistic adaptations.Results The field shows rapid growth, with a 19.45 percent annual increase in publications and strong concentration in Australia, the United States, and China. Conceptual synthesis highlights persistent disagreement about the construct, absence of an agreed gold standard, and frequent reliance on cross-sectional surveys, vignette methods, and non-representative samples. The meta-analysis yielded a pooled mean score of 113.79 (95% CI: 106.79–120.80) and very high heterogeneity (Q[11] = 6,747.59, p < .001; I2 = 99.8%; τ2 ≈ 153) across 6257 participants, indicating substantial differences in Mental Health Literacy levels globally. The prediction interval (85.11–142.48) confirms that expected levels may vary widely across comparable populations.Conclusions These findings call for theoretically grounded, culturally sensitive measurement frameworks and interventions that explicitly target the psychological mediators of help-seeking behavior, with direct implications for global mental health policy and practice.