Mental Health Europe (MHE) invited key figures from all over Europe to the launch ‘Bridging Policy Making and Human Experience’ of its new long-term Strategic Plan 2022-2025. Under MHE’s new vision of building “a Europe where everyone’s mental health and wellbeing flourish across their life course”, the launch featured speakers with lived experiences and mental health expertise to bring their human experiences at the forefront of policy-making and MHE work for the years ahead.

The Strategy launch shone light on the theme of this year’s World Mental Health Day (October 10th), ‘Mental Health in an Unequal World,’ highlighting the many inequalities and risks that people experiencing mental ill health can face including social exclusion and poor physical health.

MHE Director Claudia Marinetti said, “For over 35 years MHE has led the mental health movement across Europe, taking a human rights, recovery based approach. Now more than ever, MHE feels the need to reinforce a psychosocial and recovery approach to counterbalance the overreliance on a medical model of mental health, which is at risk of being further exacerbated by the current pandemic. 

There is a need to move beyond urgency-driven medical solutions and instead adopt a public health, human rights, recovery oriented psychosocial approach to mental health. This is why we have renovated our commitment to work in a holistic way that puts human rights and people with lived experience at the centre of our actions.”

Catherine Brogan, MHE President said, “To bring about real change, we have to work through co-creation to shape policies and services that are respectful of the rights of persons with mental health problems and psychosocial disabilities. This means fostering equality-based collaborations involving experts by experience, their family members, supporters, service providers, community and voluntary partners, e policy makers, where all expertise and perspectives as equally valid and valued.”