Psychological suffering is relative

The reality is that psychological suffering is not a clearly defined disorder, but a deeply human phenomenon. It is rooted in relationships, meaning, vulnerability, purpose, and community. It cannot be isolated in a laboratory or fully captured in diagnostic categories. Psychological distress exists between people, not just inside them — and that is precisely what it is really about.

When people go through a crisis, what they need first is not a diagnosis, but human contact. Someone who is present and who stays. Someone who does not immediately try to fix the problem, but who first seeks to understand what is happening. Someone who can help create a small light in the darkness.

From protocol-driven care to human-centred mental healthcare

Only after that does the real work begin: searching together for something that might help someone start again. And if we look beyond scientific protocols alone, this is rarely a standardised treatment. It is better understood as a meaningful experiment — or even a ritual — that resonates with a person’s life story and worldview.

For one person, that experiment might be getting a dog. For another, meditation, physical exercise, a recovery academy, volunteer work, or music. And yes, sometimes it is an antidepressant or EMDR. The crucial point is not what the intervention is, but whether it fits into someone’s sense of self, values, and direction in life.

This requires a mental healthcare sector that is both rational and generous — one that offers freedom of choice. A system with low thresholds, where entry is easy and first aid consists of presence and attention. A sector in which professionals are not all-knowing experts, but companions who help people explore, understand, and experiment.

Much more work in groups

A large part of what we currently do behind closed treatment-room doors should happen in groups. Not only because this is more cost-effective, but because it is actually more like human-centred mental healthcare.

Groups generate things that rarely emerge in one-to-one sessions: recognition, humour, mutual reflection, and connectedness. People hear each other’s stories, realise they are not alone, and begin to rebuild social skills in a natural way.

The form of the group matters less than the fact that it exists. Recovery groups, walking groups, cooking clubs, creative workshops — what matters is a safe space where people can meet. Such spaces allow people to breathe, practise, take small risks, and slowly step out of isolation.

Importantly, these groups do not always need professionals in charge. Experience experts or group members themselves can facilitate them. The professional role shifts from treater to facilitator: someone who supports continuity and safety rather than control. Participation does not have to be linear or mandatory — people can come and go. And that, in itself, reflects how recovery actually works.

Social skills cannot be outsourced to therapy

Just as important: recovery requires social interaction. If someone spends most of their time alone in a room, one hour of therapy per week will never be enough. There must be places where people can simply be: recovery academies, community centres, workplaces, meeting spaces — environments where relationships form and purpose emerges.

This means organising mental healthcare differently. It means moving away from endless waiting for diagnoses or narrowly defined evidence-based treatments that only partly help, toward a system that actively connects people. A system oriented around groups, recovery academies, and communities filled with hope.

What about the specialists?

Specialists — psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health nurses — do not disappear in this model. On the contrary, they come closer.

Not after four months on a waiting list, in a treatment room far removed from daily life, but within that daily life. At recovery academies, community centres, GP practices. Their role changes from director to consultant, from assessor to co-researcher.

They contribute expertise when needed: in crises, when medication or diagnostics are relevant, when complexity increases. But they always work in connection with the network around the person — alongside experience experts, social workers, family members, and peers.

In this model, specialists are no longer gatekeepers of the system, but its hinges. They enable movement rather than control access.

Mental healthcare as an ecosystem

This is what we call the Ecosystem of Mental Health. Entry is not based on diagnosis, but on four simple questions:

• What happened?

• Who are you, in relation to your sensitivities, talents, and values?

• Who belongs with you?

• Where do you want to go in life?

From there, people explore together which sources of support — formal, informal, or personal — can help restore direction and meaning.

This may sound idealistic, but it is already happening. In community centres, recovery academies, and other initiatives where professionals, experience experts, and people with lived experience work together. The challenge is not to invent something entirely new, but to organise it better — so that humanity does not keep getting lost between spreadsheets and protocols.

Time for a mental healthcare sector of connection and hope

A human-centred mental healthcare system does not start with the question of diagnosis, but with presence, relationships, and meaning. Only by organising care around connection and community can mental healthcare truly begin to work.

So it is time to organise mental health around relationships, purpose, and social connection. Time for a sector that invites people to live together with what is difficult. A sector with room for difference, for rituals, and for hope.

Where the first question is not “What is wrong with you?”, but
“What happened to you — and how can we move forward together?”