In Touch with the Mind: Participatory Pathways to Mental Health

Mental health is deeply personal, but it is also shaped by relationships, communities, institutions, and social conditions. Research can help us understand these connections. Yet research also raises important questions: Who decides what should be studied? Whose knowledge is taken seriously? And how can people affected by mental health issues participate not only as research subjects, but as collaborators in producing knowledge and shaping change?

This interactive science exhibition explores different pathways towards more participatory mental health research. Through visual materials, interactive stations, questions, and collective activities, visitors are invited to engage with key stages of the research process—from identifying relevant issues and developing research questions to interpreting findings and considering possible actions.

An ongoing participatory project with international students provides one concrete example. It examines mental health in the university context and shows how lived experience, collaborative reflection, and research can be brought into dialogue. At the same time, the exhibition opens the discussion beyond the university: What could participatory mental health research look like in communities, care settings, institutions, or everyday life?

Visitors can move through the exhibition at their own pace, reflect on the perspectives presented, contribute their own experiences and questions, and explore both the possibilities and challenges of participation. The exhibition does not present research as a finished product. Instead, it invites visitors to experience research as an open, collaborative, and potentially transformative process.