Four years after the 4th international meeting of the WHO-Collaborating Centre of Lille on “How to promote empowerment experiences for mental health service users and carers in Europe? - Indicators and good practices”, the French and international context has considerably evolved. A greater consideration of experiential knowledge and the development of the dialogue between health-care professionals, service-users and common citizens can be observed. In this context, the WHO-Collaborating Centre of Lille organized two days of debate and exchange on how to continue enhancing the empowerment of people living with mental health problems and their carers. The 5th international meeting of the WHO-Collaborating Centre of Lille “Active Citizenship and empowerment in community mental health - Participative innovations in France and abroad” took place on 29-30 March 2018 in Lille and gathered more than 500 mental health service users, carers, researchers and SME’s representatives from all over the world.
During the first day, attendees discussed about participative innovations concerning the organization of community mental health services in France and abroad. Attendees also exchanged on the evolution of approaches in initial and professional education and the development of participatory research on mental health as tools to foster service-users and carers participation. Last but not least, the second day was dedicated to the development of new technologies in mental health, its impact on access to information for users and the potential for their empowerment. This second day was organized in the framework of the E-men project.
After a presentation of the objectives and activities of the E-men project, the second day began with a plenary session aimed at answering the question: E-mental health - interest for the user and politico-economic stakes, does it match or not? A representative from the French national health conference, a mental health service user and a family carer having developed an e-mental health tool animated the debate. A second plenary session tried to investigate what users and health professionals think about e-mental health. In this framework, the results of the French study EQUME (Qualitative Study of the Expectations, Needs and Uses of M-Health - eHealth Technology in Mental Health - by All Stakeholders) were presented.
Different workshops based on the results of a call for communications consequently took place. Two sessions were dedicated to communications concerning “E-mental health and Self-Help”. Other workshops focused on “E-mental health for training and information” and “E-mental health for expression and exchange”. Simultaneously, a workshop aimed at co-designing an e-mental health tool based on the Design Thinking methodology was organized ("E-Health for dummies: co-constructing an e-mental health device").
The conference proceedings will be available soon on the website of the WHO-Collaborating Centre of Lille. Videos of the conference are also available on Youtube.
