World Mental Health Day calls for service users to shape care
WHO’s 10 October campaign puts people with lived experience at the centre of policy, service design and evaluation.
World Mental Health Day on 10 October is focusing on a question that goes beyond awareness: who gets to shape the care people receive?
The World Health Organization’s 2026 campaign calls for people with lived experience of mental health conditions to become equal partners in decisions about services. It argues that personal experience contributes knowledge that professional training and research alone cannot provide.
That involvement should extend from developing policy and designing services to putting them into practice and assessing whether they work. Sharing individual testimonies, while valuable, is not the same as having a role in decisions.
The campaign also stresses dignity, freedom and support within communities. People who have experienced institutional care should help guide changes towards person-centred services.
There is no single experience that represents everyone. The practical message for organisations is therefore to involve diverse service users throughout the process, rather than inviting a representative only after plans have been settled.
Source: World Health Organization — https://www.who.int/campaigns/world-mental-health-day/2026