Over the past decade, Chinese universities have substantially increased investment in student mental health services, including the expansion of counseling staff, the institutionalization of mental health curricula, and the development of crisis intervention systems. Despite these efforts, recent evidence suggests that improvements in students' psychological well-being have not fully matched the expansion of institutional investments. Instead, elevated levels of depression and anxiety symptoms continue to be reported among university students. This discrepancy between increased investment and persistent mental health challenges suggests a potential limitation in existing mental health promotion strategies within higher education.

A critical issue underlying current practice is the predominant focus on the individual as the primary target of intervention. Existing approaches in university mental health promotion have largely emphasized individual-level assessment, adjustment, counseling, and skill training. While such approaches are valuable and empirically supported, they tend to treat environmental conditions as background factors rather than as active contributors to psychological functioning. As a result, the systematic role of the environment in shaping students' cognitive load, emotional regulation, and social integration remains under-theorized.

This paper argues that university mental health promotion requires a conceptual shift from an individual-centered model to an individual-environment transactional perspective. Drawing on three established theoretical traditions in environmental psychology---Attention Restoration Theory (ART), Stress Recovery Theory (SRT), and Place Attachment Theory (PAT)---this paper integrates these previously relatively independent mechanisms into a unified analytical framework. Although each theory has developed a strong empirical base, they have rarely been systematically combined to explain how university environments jointly influence psychological outcomes across cognitive, affective, and social domains.

Based on this integration, this paper proposes a three-dimensional framework consisting of restorativeness, safety, and belongingness. Restorativeness captures the extent to which environmental features support the recovery of directed attention and cognitive resources. Safety reflects environmental conditions that reduce chronic stress exposure and support physiological and emotional regulation. Belongingness refers to the extent to which environments facilitate stable emotional attachment, social connection, and identity construction within institutional settings. Together, these three dimensions provide a structured lens through which the psychological impact of university environments can be systematically analyzed and compared.

Beyond theoretical integration, this paper further translates this framework into four practical domains of implementation within university contexts: spatial environments, institutional systems, social communities, and governance structures. At the spatial level, universities are encouraged to move beyond simple indicators such as green space coverage and instead develop distributed restorative environmental networks embedded in students' daily mobility paths. At the institutional level, policy structures, evaluation systems, and administrative arrangements are conceptualized as core psychological environments that shape stress appraisal processes. At the social level, the formation of weak-tie networks and micro-communities is emphasized as a critical complement to formal support systems. At the governance level, this paper highlights the importance of evidence-based decision-making and systematic assessment of environmental impacts on mental health outcomes.

The framework is particularly relevant for research-intensive universities, which are characterized by sustained cognitive demands, highly quantified evaluation systems, and pronounced structural heterogeneity among students, faculty, and staff. These conditions may increase cognitive demands and institutional pressures while also generating diverse environmental needs across different groups. Moreover, the increasing internationalization of higher education further complicates place-based meaning construction and social integration processes. As such, research-intensive universities represent a particularly suitable context for examining the proposed environmental framework.

In conclusion, this paper suggests that university mental health should not be understood solely as an outcome of individual coping capacity, but rather as a systemic product emerging from continuous interaction between individuals and their environments. The proposed framework contributes to the literature by offering a structured integration of environmental psychological theories and by extending mental health promotion from an individual-focused intervention model to a multi-level environmental system perspective. It also provides a conceptual basis for future empirical research, policy design, and campus planning aimed at creating psychologically supportive higher education environments.