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In France, Local Mental Health Councils (CLSMs) represent one of the few approaches that bring together the three core principles of public mental health: the inclusion of people with lived experience of mental health conditions, the territorial grounding of responses, and cross-sectoral approaches. However, despite nearly 30 years of existence and their gradual expansion (with around 300 territories covered in 2025), implementation remains uneven, resources are insufficient, and many stakeholders have yet to fully engage with them. At a time when mental health has been declared a national priority and debates oscillate between the need to support an under-resourced psychiatric system and the development of less medically centered responses, there is an urgent need to position CLSMs as strategic pillars of an ambitious public mental health policy in France. This article argues that CLSMs are neither a technical tool nor simply another coordination mechanism, but rather a fully-fledged democratic and political approach—one that fosters local collective intelligence to act jointly on the factors that shape mental health at the community level. It seeks to open a space for debate: What institutional, political, and cultural conditions are needed to recognize, strengthen, and scale up CLSMs as key drivers of a genuine shift toward public mental health?