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The aim of this article is to look back on the history of the concept of “mental health.” I want to give special attention to the fact that, at a particular moment, a whole field of knowledge and practices came to be organized around mental health and not, as has been the case in other periods, around insanity, or a prophylactic approach to mental illness. This article considers the impact of this relatively recent transformation on the way in which public policy is organized around this field. It examines what is at stake in the concept of “mental health” in the 1940s–1960s and shows, in particular, how mental health implied a specific style of analyzing social, economic, and political problems, which insisted more on the affective effects of these problems on individuals or on human relations, and a peculiar form of biopolitics, which focused on governing these affective effects on individual development instead of on intervening in the social and economic conditions themselves. Mental health, I argue, has been a central piece in the development of what we can call a psychopolitics.