A systematic review of the literature on health promotion as conveyed by the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion yielded two major findings: health promotion and recovery in mental health have many values and features in common, and health promotion and recovery in mental health do not refer very much to one another. A global model of public mental health is therefore needed to bring recovery and health promotion together, to clarify the boundaries of mental health promotion and to promote citizenship for everyone. Inspired and adapted from the ecological approach initially developed on the basis of health promotion programs, the model introduced here addresses mainly the issue of recovery, which has been neglected recently in the literature on both public health and mental health promotion. It advocates the idea that recovery can explicitly be related to mental health promotion through the Ottawa Charter for health promotion. Many issues and sub-issues are addressed, and the global model suggests keeping track of various activities unfolding at five levels, with examples of citizen psychiatry. The uniqueness and additional contribution of this model to already existing literature are that the supranational level is a key component of an approach that would truly be global.