World Mental Health Day

Backed by WHO, this day focuses on providing accessible mental health support to people affected by conflicts, disasters, and displacement.

Moving from listening to meaningful participation: people who have experienced mental-health conditions and mental-health services should have a meaningful role in shaping the systems that affect their lives.

WHO frames lived experience as a form of expertise that can identify barriers and problems that professional training and research alone may overlook.

• Treat lived experience as expertise, not simply as personal testimony.
• Involve people with lived experience in the design, implementation and evaluation of mental-health services.
• Move from asking people to tell their stories toward giving them real influence over decisions.
• Strengthen person-centered and rights-based mental-health care.
• Challenge stigma, discrimination and social exclusion.
• Expand community-based mental-health services and reduce unnecessary reliance on institutional care.
• Protect people's dignity, autonomy, choice and participation.
• Strengthen peer-support approaches and opportunities for people with lived experience to support others.
• Address practical barriers involving housing, employment, education and social participation.
• Improve access to quality, affordable mental-health care.
• Include families and caregivers while respecting the autonomy and voices of people receiving care.
• Make mental-health systems more responsive to the actual experiences of the people who use them.

• Mental health
• Lived experience
• Mental-health conditions
• Psychosocial disability
• Psychological first aid
• Trauma-informed care
• Community resilience
• Humanitarian mental health
• Mental-health care
• Person-centered care
• Rights-based care
• Community-based care
• Deinstitutionalization
• Dignity
• Stigma
• Discrimination
• Caregiver support