BackgroundMental health and social exclusion are increasingly recognized as intertwined public health challenges. The aftermath of the COVID-19 underscores the need to integrate psychological well-being into national development and social inclusion agendas. Evidence and causal analyses from Southeast Asia remain sparse.Design and methodsThis study combines longitudinal descriptive trends from the Indonesian Family Life Survey with an instrumental variable probit regression using cross-sectional data and examines the causal relationship between mental health and key dimensions of social exclusion: employment status and community participation. To address potential endogeneity and bidirectionality, “family mental health history” was employed as an instrumental variable, offering a theoretically plausible and statistically valid proxy for exogenous variation in individual mental health.Results …