Listening must lead to change

More than one billion people live with a mental health condition, yet support remains scarce, unequal and too often disconnected from everyday life. This World Mental Health Day, philanthropy can help turn greater awareness into lasting change.

Every year on 10 October, World Mental Health Day invites us to speak more openly about mental health. In 2026, its theme - “Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change” - asks us to go further.¹

Listening matters. But it becomes meaningful only when people with lived experience can influence the policies, services and funding decisions that affect their lives. 

That is particularly important now. Awareness of mental health has grown, but investment and access to support have not kept pace.

More than one billion people worldwide live with a mental health condition. They are among the leading causes of disability globally, affecting people of every age, income and background.²

Their consequences extend far beyond health. Mental health influences whether children can learn, whether adults can work, whether families can withstand crises and whether communities can thrive.

The burden is particularly acute for young people. Adolescence is a crucial period of development, yet many young people experience anxiety, depression, loneliness or trauma without timely support.

An estimated 727,000 people died by suicide in 2021. It is the third leading cause of death among people aged 15–29, while 73% of suicide deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries.³

Despite the scale of the need, countries allocate an average of only 2% of their health budgets to mental health. The global median mental health workforce is just 13 workers for every 100,000 people, with much more severe shortages in lower-income countries.³

These figures reveal more than a shortage of services. They reveal systems that too often wait until someone reaches crisis point.

Clinical care is essential, but the mental health challenge cannot be addressed through specialist treatment alone. 

Mental health is shaped by the conditions in which people grow, learn, work and live. Poverty, discrimination, conflict, displacement, violence, isolation and insecurity can all increase distress. Schools, workplaces, families, communities and digital environments can either protect mental health or undermine it. 

Stigma remains another barrier. People may fear judgement or discrimination, while the services available to them may not feel culturally appropriate, accessible or trustworthy. 

In some settings, institutional models of care continue to restrict people’s dignity, agency and rights. The UN Human Rights Office has called for mental health systems to adopt more rights-based, person-centred approaches and to involve people with lived experience meaningfully in decisions.⁴

Digital life adds further complexity, particularly for young people. Technology can create connection and widen access to support. It can also expose people to cyberbullying, harmful content, social comparison and isolation. Evidence, safeguards and public policy are struggling to keep pace with technological change. 

The central question is therefore not simply: How do we treat more people? 

It is: How do we create environments and systems that promote mental health, prevent distress where possible, and make effective support available early, locally and without stigma?

here is no single intervention that will solve the global mental health challenge. However, there is strong evidence about the direction change should take. 

First, support needs to move closer to where people live their lives. Mental health can be integrated into primary healthcare, schools, community organizations and humanitarian services. With appropriate training and supervision, teachers, community health workers, peers and other trusted people can identify difficulties earlier, offer support and connect people with specialist care when necessary.⁵

Second, prevention must receive much greater attention. This includes strengthening social connection and emotional skills, reducing exposure to violence, creating safer digital environments and supporting families and caregivers. 

Evidence-based suicide prevention measures include responsible media reporting, strengthening young people’s socio-emotional skills, identifying and supporting people at risk, and limiting access to the means of suicide.⁶

Third, care should be community-based, person-centred and respectful of human rights. People experiencing mental health challenges must be treated as partners with knowledge and agency, rather than simply as recipients of services. 

Finally, solutions need to be designed with the people they are intended to serve. The voices of people with lived experience - including children and young people - should influence priorities, program design, implementation and measurement. 

Governments carry the primary responsibility for ensuring access to mental healthcare. But philanthropy has an important and distinctive role to play. 

It can provide flexible capital to test promising approaches, strengthen organizations and generate evidence. It can support risks that public systems may initially be unable to take. It can also help effective approaches become integrated into government, education, and health systems. 

To realize that potential, funders should consider five shifts:

1. Fund earlier, not only at crisis point
   Prevention, social connection and early intervention can reduce suffering before specialist or emergency care becomes necessary. Funding should extend across the full continuum - from promoting wellbeing to providing treatment and crisis support. 
2. Invest in the wider mental health workforce
   Specialists will always be essential, but they cannot meet the scale of demand alone. Community workers, teachers, peers and primary-care professionals can dramatically expand access when they receive appropriate training, supervision and referral pathways.⁷
3. Provide patient and flexible funding
   Community organizations cannot build trusted relationships or sustainable services through a succession of short-term, tightly restricted grants. Promising organizations need the freedom to strengthen their teams, learn, adapt, and plan beyond the next funding cycle.
4. Fund systems, not only individual programs
   Data, workforce development, coordination, shared measurement and policy engagement may be less visible than direct service delivery, but they are essential to lasting change.
   Funders can also help overcome fragmentation by pooling capital, aligning around shared outcomes and supporting collaboration between governments, service providers, researchers and communities. 
5. Share power with people who have lived experience
   People with lived experience should help inform priorities, programme design and accountability. This requires more than consultation: it means systematically incorporating lived experience alongside research, data and practitioner expertise to guide funding and implementation decisions. 

At UBS Optimus Foundation, this thinking is shaping our growing focus on youth mental health. 

We support approaches that strengthen social connection, expand access to trusted and culturally appropriate support, seek to prevent self-harm and suicide, help schools intervene earlier, develop community-led care and improve the digital environments in which young people spend their time. 

We see mental health not just as a standalone concern, but as a foundation for progress in education, health, economic opportunity, and resilience. Our role is to support evidence-based solutions, connect partners and capital, and help promising approaches move towards sustainable scale.

World Mental Health Day creates a valuable moment for attention and conversation. But the true measure of progress is not how much we talk about mental health on one day. 

It is whether people can find support when and where they need it. It is whether services protect their rights and dignity. And it is whether people with lived experience have a real voice in shaping the systems intended to serve them. 

Much of the knowledge and experience, along with many of the solutions, already exist. What remains insufficient is the sustained commitment to fund them, connect them and put them into practice. 

Listening should be the beginning. Real change is what must follow.

1. World Health Organization. “World Mental Health Day 2026 – Lived experiences heard: real voices, real change.” 
   
2. World Health Organization.World Mental Health Today: Latest Data. 2 September 2025. 
   
3. World Health Organization. “WHO releases new reports and estimates highlighting urgent gaps in mental health.” 2 September 2025. 
   
4. United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.Mental Health and Human Rights. 14 January 2025. 
   
5. World Health Organization.Mental Health Gap Action Programme Guideline for Mental, Neurological and Substance Use Disorders. 
   
6.  World Health Organization.LIVE LIFE Initiative for Suicide Prevention. 
   
7. Miller, B.F. and Bridgespan Group.Expanding the Mental Health Care Continuum: A Framework for Philanthropic Investment in the Mental Health Workforce. May 2026.