AVES MH

AVES MH Developing and empowering global lived experience leaders. https://www.gmhpn.org/services.html

Experts by Experience engagement and consultations, document and policy reviews, meet the people who tell their stories about thriving with a mental health condition.

Educational exclusion rarely announces itself. It shows up as a child who stops enrolling. An adolescent who drops out. ...
05/06/2026

Educational exclusion rarely announces itself. It shows up as a child who stops enrolling. An adolescent who drops out.

A young adult who never makes it to post-secondary school. For people with mental health conditions and psychosocial disabilities, these patterns are not random.

They are consistent across high-income and low-and-middle-income countries alike, shaped by stigma, discrimination, and systems that treat mental health as a reason to exclude rather than a reason to support.

Interrupted education has lifelong consequences for employment, financial security, and mental health itself. Closing that gap starts with naming it clearly.

Our aves Mental Health Advocates attended the WHO Intercountry Learning Workshop for East & Southern Africa in Johannesb...
04/06/2026

Our aves Mental Health Advocates attended the WHO Intercountry Learning Workshop for East & Southern Africa in Johannesburg, from 27th to 29th May. This event was hosted to advance key strategies in strengthening the implementation of the comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan 2013-2030 in Africa, focusing on:

*Leadership & Governance
*Integrating mental health services at primary/community level
*Better data & Research
*Prevention & addressing social determinants

WHO has developed various resources that are available through the MHIN website. We implore all mental health stakeholders to leverage the work being done in your regions and to continue to push for better mental health for all in Africa.

Resources found here: https://www.mhinnovation.net/resources/compendium-who-hq-mental-health-documents-2001-2025

Our advocates share some of their takeaways from this event below.

We rarely talk about the conditions that make mental health services succeed or fail. When people with mental health con...
04/06/2026

We rarely talk about the conditions that make mental health services succeed or fail.

When people with mental health conditions and psychosocial disabilities lack stable, safe homes, no amount of clinical intervention fully compensates.

The evidence now shows that securing housing protects against early death, including su***de, more than any other single service.

That finding should reshape how we think about mental health investment and where the priority needs to be.

The old model assumed stability had to be earned. Housing First flips that. When people have a safe, permanent place to ...
03/06/2026

The old model assumed stability had to be earned. Housing First flips that. When people have a safe, permanent place to live and a choice over the support they access, outcomes improve. Not because the mental health conditions disappear, but because the conditions for addressing them finally exist. It's a shift from gatekeeping to trust, and the evidence has followed it across countries and contexts. The question now is how much further it needs to scale.
&mentalhealth

Our May newsletter is out! Use the link below to explore the latest news, stories, and developments from across our work...
03/06/2026

Our May newsletter is out! Use the link below to explore the latest news, stories, and developments from across our work and community.

https://canva.link/s1vhlea3k7o0f7t

When we treat disability as an edge case, we build systems for the exception rather than the rule. The reality is that d...
02/06/2026

When we treat disability as an edge case, we build systems for the exception rather than the rule. The reality is that disability sits at the intersection of public health, human rights, and development, and the barriers people face are not accidental.
They are built in. Stigma shapes who gets care. Poverty shapes who gets support. Age and gender compound both. Addressing mental and physical disability meaningfully means starting with that full picture.

The conditions for transformative change in mental health have never been more favourable. And the urgency has never bee...
29/05/2026

The conditions for transformative change in mental health have never been more favourable. And the urgency has never been greater.

Mental health is now recognised as a global health imperative within the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. The right to health framework gives States clear guidance on where rights-based policies and investments must go. The evidence base for effective psychosocial interventions in the community continues to grow.

What is needed now is the courage to follow through. That means integrating mental health into primary and general health care in a meaningful way as a core component. It means involving all stakeholders, including people with lived experience, in the development of public policies that address the underlying determinants of mental health. This means making a decisive break from the culture of coercion, isolation, and excessive medicalization that has caused so much harm for so long.

Parity between physical and mental health is achievable. But it will not happen on its own.

At aves Mental Health, we believe this moment calls for ambition, accountability, and action rooted in the voices of those most affected.

What would real parity between physical and mental health look like in your country or community?

The alternatives to coercive psychiatric care are not theoretical. They exist, and in some places, they are already repl...
28/05/2026

The alternatives to coercive psychiatric care are not theoretical. They exist, and in some places, they are already replacing emergency medicalized treatment entirely.

Open Dialogue in Lapland has done exactly that. The Soteria House model has been successfully recreated across multiple countries. Recovery colleges, peer-led crisis houses, respite houses, personal ombudsmen, empowerment psychiatry, and family support conferencing are all part of a growing evidence base for what non-coercive, recovery-based mental health care can look like in practice.

At the centre of many of these models is peer support. When it is not compromised by institutional pressures, peer support provides hope, builds autonomy, and enables people to learn from the lived experience of others in ways that clinical relationships alone cannot replicate.

Measuring progress toward the right to health means tracking the availability of these alternatives and the reduction of non-consensual measures. Not as aspirational targets, but as concrete indicators of systems that are genuinely changing.

At aves Mental Health, we believe peer support and non-coercive models are not the future of mental health care. For many people, they are already the present.

What non-coercive models are you seeing make a real difference in your community?

Programmes built without communities rarely work for communities.Migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and people with men...
27/05/2026

Programmes built without communities rarely work for communities.

Migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and people with mental health conditions and psychosocial disabilities face overlapping barriers to integration and economic independence.

Culturally sensitive education and career outreach, targeted employment and housing initiatives, and empowerment-focused support can make a real difference. But only when they are developed in genuine partnership with the people they are meant to serve.

That means engaging all stakeholders in local communities from the outset. Creating local working groups, holding public meetings and community dialogues, organizing discussion forums, and implementing solutions that emerge from within communities rather than being imposed from outside.

It also means making deliberate efforts to reach hard-to-reach and under-resourced areas, ensuring that people from diverse demographics and backgrounds, including those with mental health conditions and psychosocial disabilities, have a real voice in shaping what support looks like.

What does genuine community-led design look like in your context?

The evidence is there. The interventions exist. The investment is not.Psychosocial interventions consistently produce po...
26/05/2026

The evidence is there. The interventions exist. The investment is not.

Psychosocial interventions consistently produce positive health outcomes. They can be delivered in community health settings, at low cost, over short timeframes. They reduce the need for more invasive medicalization. And yet they continue to be treated as optional extras rather than the essential treatments they are.

This is a failure of prioritization, not a failure of evidence.

Changing this requires equipping the full range of community health workers, nurses, general practitioners, midwives, social workers, and community health workers, with psychosocial skills. It requires integrating these interventions into regular health care rather than siloing them as specialist services. And it requires a fundamental shift in how health systems define first-line treatment for mental health issues.

Community-led psychosocial support is not a compromise on quality. It is what quality looks like for the majority of people who experience mental health conditions.

How are psychosocial interventions valued and resourced in the health systems you work within?

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