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European Mental Health Awareness Week 2024

Introduction

Annually in May, the European Week for Mental Health is dedicated to raising awareness, educating, and advocating on mental health issues across Europe. Hosted by a collaboration of individuals, professionals, and organisations, the event features workshops, seminars, and public talks. Each year, GAMIAN-Europe creates a small awareness campaign to celebrate this important week.

For European Mental Health Week 2024, we launched a series of videos titled “Is AI Stigmatising Mental Health?” This series focused on the potential bias in AI towards people living with mental health conditions.. We asked AI to generate images of people living with different mental health conditions and then invited individuals with these conditions to comment and react to the results.

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Objectives

The overall aim of the project was to show the bias that AI has when it comes to already stigmatised topics such as mental health and the stereotypes surrounding mental health conditions in general. Not because AI is inherently biased, but because the the data on which it is trained is.

This project will be followed up by further events and initiatives that look for form close collaboration with different stakeholders from AI developers to policymakers. This is to make sure that this bias is addressed before it can perpetuate or even increase the levels of stigma already experienced by millions of people living with different mental health conditions.