About World Mental Health Day
Every year on 10 October, World Mental Health Day brings global attention to mental health and highlights priorities for improving mental health care.
This year’s theme, “Lived experiences heard: real voices, real change”, focuses on the importance of meaningfully involving people with lived experience of mental health conditions in the policies, services, and decisions that affect their lives. People with lived experience bring valuable knowledge and perspectives that can help make mental health services more responsive, person-centred, and effective. Meaningful involvement means ensuring that people are able to contribute to the design, delivery, and evaluation of the care and policies that affect them.
To achieve this, policymakers, governments, healthcare professionals, service providers, communities, and people with lived experience must work together. By creating opportunities for genuine participation, supporting integrated and person-centred care, and ensuring that lived experience informs policy and practice, we can build mental health systems that are more responsive to people’s needs.
SIP’s commitment to better mental health policies
For the Societal Impact of Pain (SIP) Platform, this message is particularly important. Pain and mental health are closely interconnected, yet they are still too often addressed separately in healthcare systems and policy.
SIP has long advocated for greater recognition of the relationship between pain and mental health. In 2023, the platform published the SIP Joint Statement on Pain and Mental Health together with ten organisations working in the fields of pain, pain-related conditions, and mental health. Later that year, SIP brought the discussion to the European Parliament through its event “Pain and Mental Health: A Societal Impact of Pain (SIP) Event” and contributed to the development of the European Parliament’s report on mental health. In 2024, SIP continued to raise awareness of the issue by publishing an infographic summarising the key recommendations of the 2023 Joint Statement.
This work remains highly relevant to this year’s World Mental Health Day theme. SIP’s Joint Statement specifically calls for people with lived experience of mental health conditions and conditions involving pain to be involved in developing integrated services.
On this World Mental Health Day, let us continue working towards health systems that listen to and meaningfully involve people with lived experience. Policymakers, governments, healthcare professionals, patient organisations, communities, and individuals all have a role to play in ensuring that their voices help shape more integrated, person-centred, and responsive care.
Find the Joint Statement, infographic, and more information about SIP’s work on pain and mental health here.
Learn more about World Mental Health Day here.