PARTNER
COUNTRY
Global
TIMEFRAME
2026-2031
The challenge.
Across many countries, people with mental health conditions continue to face serious human rights violations. Each year, 8.4 million people are institutionalised. Large psychiatric institutions, coercive practices and outdated legislation can separate people from their families and communities, sometimes for years. For individuals, this can mean being denied autonomy, dignity and choice. In some countries, suicide also remains criminalised, deterring people in distress from seeking support, reinforcing stigma, and undermining efforts to prevent suicide.
These legal and structural barriers prevent people with lived experience of mental health problems from influencing the decisions that affect their lives, ultimately undermining opportunities for recovery.
Although momentum for reform is growing, translating international commitments into national laws, policies and practice remains a complex, long-term process. Sustainable change requires coordinated advocacy, strong national partnerships and meaningful leadership from people with lived experience to ensure mental health systems respect dignity, autonomy and human rights.
Driving change together.
Fondation d’Harcourt has established a multi-year partnership with United for Global Mental Health, a global organisation advancing rights-based mental health reform through advocacy, policy change and lived-experience leadership.
The partnership supports action to accelerate deinstitutionalisation and decriminalise suicide across multiple regions. It brings together governments, civil society organisations, legal experts and people with lived experience to shape rights-based mental health laws and policies that promote community-based care and recovery.
Alongside legislative reform, the initiative strengthens lived-experience leadership through an Expert by Experience Action Group, enabling advocates to influence national and global policy. It also provides general operational support to build organisational resilience, while developing monitoring mechanisms to increase accountability and sustain momentum for community-based mental health care.
Together, Fondation d’Harcourt and United for Global Mental Health are helping create the conditions for mental health systems that replace exclusion and coercion with dignity, inclusion, recovery and community-based support, all while keeping experts by experience at the forefront of change.
Partnership impact.
300
•
lived experience voices elevated at global/national political gatherings
34
•
advocates have joined our global advocacy network for Disability Inclusion
4
•
countries where law and policy reform coalitions are formed
4
•
countries in which laws and policies are influenced to align with human rights
5
•
UN political declarations, resolutions, reports influenced
