10 October 2026
This World Mental Health Day, GAMIAN-Europe is launching Mind the Gap: A Toolkit for Building Bridges to Accessible Care, a new resource exploring practical ways to make mental health care more accessible, coordinated and person centred.
This year’s World Mental Health Day asks an important question: how can lived experience lead to real change?
The 2026 theme, “Lived experiences heard: real voices, real change,” recognises lived experience as an important form of expertise. It calls for people with lived experience to have meaningful opportunities to shape the policies, services and decisions that affect their lives.
For GAMIAN-Europe, this means moving beyond listening alone and looking at how people’s experiences can contribute to better mental health care in practice.
Introducing Mind the Gap
Our new Mind the Gap toolkit brings together insights from people with lived experience, informal carers and mental health clinicians. It also draws on research into innovative models of care for people with complex and multiple mental health needs.
Across Europe, gaps in mental health care remain a major challenge. People may face long waiting times, difficulties accessing the right services and poor coordination between mental health, physical health and social care. For those with complex or multiple needs, navigating different services can be particularly difficult.
Mind the Gap looks at practical ways to address these challenges and make care work better for the people who use it.
What does accessible care look like?
Better access is not simply about having more services available. It is also about making sure that support is coordinated, inclusive and built around the person.
The toolkit highlights practical approaches including better communication between services, greater involvement of people and informal carers in care planning, stronger peer and community support, and clearer help to navigate different services. It also explores key elements of coordinated care, such as ensuring there is no wrong door when someone asks for help, treating different needs together, having one clear care plan and providing a main point of contact to help coordinate support.
At the centre of these approaches is a simple principle: care should adapt to people, rather than expecting people to navigate fragmented systems on their own.
Explore the Mind the Gap toolkit
Practical support for people and carers
The toolkit is designed not only for those who plan and deliver mental health services, but also for people using services, their families and informal carers.
A dedicated practical guide offers straightforward advice for people with complex mental health needs and informal carers, including how to prepare for appointments, manage waiting times, find additional support and know what to do in a crisis.
From listening to action
People with lived experience can identify barriers and priorities that may not always be visible through professional expertise or research alone. Meaningful involvement means creating opportunities for those perspectives to influence how services are planned, delivered and evaluated. The toolkit reflects this by combining lived experience, carer and clinical perspectives and translating them into practical ideas for improving access to care.
Listening matters. Turning what we hear into action matters too.
What does accessible mental health care look like to you?
Explore Mind the Gap and join the conversation using #WorldMentalHealthDay.