Main Themes

Overriding theme: Persons with Lived Experience (Led by Charlene Sunkel)

 The Rethinking Mental Health Care Conference is built on the principle that lived experience must be at the heart of every aspect of the event. From the initial planning stages to speaker participation and session moderation across the four thematic domains, individuals with lived experience are central to shaping the program and ensuring its authenticity.  

To strengthen this commitment, aves-Mental Health, an international lived experience organization based in South Africa, has joined as a community partner. Together, we are working closely to embed meaningful and genuine inclusion, ensuring that the voices of those with lived experience are not only represented but actively guide the direction and delivery of the conference.  

By centering lived experience in every aspect, promotes co‑production, authenticity, and equity and ensures that discussions and decision-making in mental health are informed by those most directly affected, leading to more responsive, inclusive, and sustainable solutions.  

Rethinking Mental Health: Taking Care of Carers (Led by Rob Keukens)

The impact of an individual’s mental suffering on their families, close friends and professionals can be profound and far-reaching. The impact varies widely, but the key is recognizing that mental suffering is not isolated—it touches everyone in the individual’s support network.

Living with a family member who struggles with mental health issues can create a stressful, unpredictable, or emotionally charged home environment. Chronic stress, prolonged exposure to conflict, or neglect can lead to feelings of helplessness, guilt, role reversal or resentment in family members, which may contribute to their own mental health struggles. Although, risk does not equal destiny, growing up in a household affected by mental illness can expose children to stress, instability, or emotional distress, which may impact their emotional regulation, self-esteem, and coping skills.

The impact can also be significant on professionals who are in the support networks of people who suffer mentally. The higher prevalence of mental health problems among mental health professionals compared to the general population is a well-documented phenomenon. Several interconnected factors contribute to this phenomenon. Mental health professionals are repeatedly exposed to client’s trauma and often absorb the emotional pain of their clients, leading to compassion fatigue, emotional exhaustion, moral distress or indirect trauma. This combined with the often an unspoken expectation that mental health professionals should be immune to mental health struggles, leading to self-stigma and reluctance to seek help. Some are drawn to mental health professions due to their own experiences with mental health, trauma, or family struggles, which can sometimes resurface in their professional lives.

Rethinking Mental Health: Veteran Mental Health (Led by Rachel Thibeault)

Peer support has been consistently documented as a vital lifeline for veterans navigating mental health challenges. Structured around shared lived experiences, it aims to transform veterans into formal or informal carers for each other. It is frequently reported in the literature that veterans respond more readily to this type of assistance than to professional interventions and, in some cases, it even yields better mental health outcomes than traditional psychotherapy (Jain et al, 2026).  However, several issues significantly limit the impact of peer support programs: lack of standardized training, poor integration with formal clinical care, a shortage of diverse peer matches for marginalized veterans (women, LGBTQ+ individuals, Military Sexual Trauma survivors etc), and high rates of burnout, to name a few. More specifically, these high burnout rates are indicative of an urgent need to care more thoroughly and systematically for the peer supporters themselves.

Because peer work carries a significant psychological load, mitigating strategies must be developed and implemented to protect peer supporters from potential secondary traumatic stress, empathetic distress, moral injury, role ambiguity, and isolation, especially for those peer supporters working online or in remote areas.

Exploring and addressing these issues would reshape the veteran care landscape and provide a framework that could scale up much needed resources while protecting both the veterans seeking help and the peer supporters who serve them.

Rethinking Mental Health: Technological Innovation in Mental Health Care (Led by Philippe Delespaul)

With the advent of AI, IT is gaining momentum in almost all aspects of daily life. This offers opportunities for access to care for patients, carers and citizens, but also new threats due to privacy challenges and potential misinformation. We may hope society will develop the hygienic tools to manage potential risks. But IT technology also offers an important boost for cheap or free low threshold solutions for handicapped people. For instance, more people can travel from ‘a’ to ‘b’ thanks to GPS that offers alternatives for reading a map or interpret the position of stars. Also, writing without errors becomes less of a challenge for dyslectic persons. And some visually handicapped people can read again using ‘voice over’ or increasing the font size. None of these solutions would have been available at no extra costs, when developed for specific groups of handicapped people and not for the general public.

Previously, therapeutically relevant information on mental health was only available to elites that received a specific academic training, often restricted to those with face-to-face access to the teachings of international scholars or to comprehensive university libraries. Nowadays, expert information is universally available without thresholds and in unrestricted quality. The democratic availability of knowledge changes the triadic expert-patient-caretaker relation. It allows shared decision making and a re-valorization of the lived experience from sufferers and caretakers. The role of professionals is shifting, opening opportunities for real collaborative care. This is crucial since recovery-oriented care highly relates to empowering persons and caretakers, to ‘do their thing’ in daily life. We are moving from experts unilaterally fixing a brain disfunction, to empower people to realize their goals in life, a challenge where expertise is shared. IT developments can support this process.

Rethinking Mental Health: Human Rights (Led by Marianne Schulze)

Care & support, from a human rights perspective, reveal competition over rights within limited resources, exacerbating indignity, denial of rights & a system beset with inequalities. Caring for carers based on human rights, first & foremost requires a gender-lens, as care & support are inherently gendered. Also, perceived (in)capacity, which frequently limits agency & therewith legal capacity, perpetuates human rights violations. Historical injustices, magnified through race, ethnicity & indigenous origin, have “contributed to harmful policies & practices under the name of care.” 

Strengthening dignity, agency & the right to [supported] decision-making requires system change, care for carers based on human rights is thus integral to Rethinking Mental Health. Centered around the meaningful involvement of people with lived experience, how can the structural underpinnings of mental health care be transformed to ensure the human rights of everyone involved, including carers?