Mentality – implementing mental health quality practices to shed light on mental health

The Mentality – Mental Health Quality Practices is an exciting new EU-funded project. Its main objective is to transfer and disseminate promising practices in mental health care, with a specific focus on children, healthcare and other care workers, people with pre-existing mental health problems and psychosocial disabilities, migrants, and service providers.

The project was officially launched in February 2023 when the seven consortium partners convened online to discuss the project’s goals, challenges, and vision. This meeting marked the beginning of a collaborative effort aimed at improving the quality of mental health care practices across the Europe. The partners are committed to sharing their expertise and working together to create sustainable solutions that will benefit people in vulnerable situations and promote positive mental health outcomes.

The Mentality Consortium  

The Mentality – Mental Health Quality Practices project is led by a consortium of seven organizations from six European countries. Mental Health Europe (based in Belgium) serves as the project coordinator and leads the efforts of Work Package 1, focused on project coordination, as well as Work Package 2, which focuses on Communication, Awareness-raising, and Exploitation.

EuroHealthNet (also based in Belgium) is responsible for analyzing the implementation of project pilots and drawing actionable insights from the experiences of the project partners. These insights will inform the development of training materials, including guidelines and video content, that can be used to support the implementation of successful mental health practices in the future.

The ESTUAR Foundation (based in Romania) will be implementing MapaWsparcia, an interactive map of facilities offering free mental health support to people experiencing mental health distress and those in vulnerable situations. This project was previously launched in Poland and has been successful in providing essential support to those in need.

Meanwhile, the League for Mental Health Slovakia will work on implementing MapaWsparcia as well as aiming to improve the mental health of children affected by Covid-19 through other innovative practices. 

The Prolepsis Institute (based in Greece) leads the development and implementation of the project Monitoring & Evaluation framework (M&E) and activities as part of Work Package 3. Additionally, Prolepsis leads on Work Package 5, which focuses on translating a storybook for children and the practice ‘Measures to support mental health of migrants and refugees in times of COVID-19′  to new contexts.  This will strengthen partnerships with key stakeholders across sectors and countries, improve processes for the practical implementation of new knowledge, and benefit those in need.

In Work Package 4, the Riga City Council from Latvia will focus on the care staff such as social workers and healthcare workers.  They will implement the practice known as ‘Team Reflection’ to promote the psycho-emotional health of care professionals in the context of increased workload and high stress conditions 

Lastly, the team of the Polish Forum Foundation, made up of 22 psychologists, will work with people from various vulnerable communities, including children, young people, adults, and members of the LGBTQ+ community who are experiencing violence or in suicidal crisis after traumatic experiences. They will also provide support to those who have difficulties functioning as parents or in other vulnerable situations. Through these efforts, the Mentality project aims to improve mental health practices and outcomes across Europe.

Mentality Project: Next steps 

Over the course of the next two years, these organizations will collaborate to implement the promising practices in their respective countries, hosting training events and producing informational and educational materials. The transfer of these promising practices will be closely monitored by the practice owners themselves, the experts and organizations who created and implemented these practices in the first place.

To stay updated on the progress of the Mentality project, please visit the project’s main webpage and follow its partners’ social media channels.