Aided mental health resilience: governing desirable states that cannot sustain themselves

Resilience in psychology and public health is usually assessed through recovery or maintained functioning, outcomes that do not reveal whether desirable states have become self-maintaining or still depend on external support. Drawing on coerced-regime theory from social-ecological systems research, we develop aided mental health resilience (AMHR), a framework for desirable mental health states established or maintained through external inputs of resources, organisation, political capital and trust. We make three contributions. First, we frame population mental health as a dimension of social-ecological system states and define the external maintenance subsidy required to sustain desirable conditions. Second, using a dialectical reading of regime change, we distinguish reversion, permanent subsidy and sublation, in which the function initially supplied by aid becomes reproduced through reorganised capacities, practices or institutions. Displacement of harm is treated as a cross-cutting failure mode. Four cases illustrate these dynamics and their limits. Third, drawing on strange loop ethics, we argue that paradoxical outcomes should trigger review not only of intervention instruments but also of the premises that define desirable states and authorise intervention. We outline disconfirmation conditions and a research agenda centred on longitudinal evaluation, subsidy accounting, displacement monitoring and recursive premise review.