The roles that mental health professionals must play to facilitate the prevention of mental illness and the introduction of mentally healthy attitudes in our society is discussed. Mental health professionals must re-examine the meaning of mental health in the context of the current world situation and ask themselves to what extent they are contributing to the fight against social injustice. Mental health is no longer the opposite of mental illness but now means human well-being. Consequently non-professionals, parents, teachers, and peers must be given rudimentary training enabling them to act as promoters of sound mental health practices and there must be community organization around mental and public health. In order to help larger numbers of people become mentally healthy, mental health workers must share a set of action-oriented principles which provide the philosophical framework for meaningful mental health activities. These principles are based on movement from institutional violence to human service orientation, from hate to love, manipulation to honesty, dependency to independence, competition to incorporation, isolation to community, professionalism to involvement in social change, security orientation to risk orientation, and prevention of mental illness to promotion of mental health. (Author/RSM)