Wellcome’s lived experience team hosted a series of webinars on how to make mental health more inclusive: from involving people with lived experience, to designing mental health interventions that stretch beyond healthcare.

These panel events, titled 'Conversations on mental health', were hosted as online webinars in June.

They gave our team and lived experience advisors the chance to discuss publicly the three principles that underpin our work: putting lived experience at the heart of policy and practice, positioning local innovation as a focus for learning and funding, and envisioning mental health as larger than healthcare.

When creating new policies or doing scientific research, it is vital to actively involve the people who will benefit from those policies and research.

In the second webinar, we looked at how important local innovations are for the long-term future of mental health science and research. Panellists explored why grassroot organisations and local innovations may have been overlooked in the past, and what could be done to have them at the forefront of mental health policy, science and research.

The conversations centered around the relationship between colonialism, westernisation and interventions around mental health. Emphasis was placed on re-imagining in a local context what works for whom and why.

Read the full article about conversations on mental health by Grace Gatera at Wellcome.