Working Together to Better Understand and Improve Mental Health Care Environments – Free Webinar

Better mental health environments need more than one kind of expertise

What does a person with lived experience notice about a mental health environment that an architect might not?

What does a clinician see that a researcher may not?

What does an operations leader understand because they live with the consequences of design decisions every day?

And what happens when those perspectives do not agree?

On Monday, October 26, the Design in Mental Health Network – North America will bring together a multidisciplinary panel to explore how different forms of expertise can help create more supportive mental health care environments.

The webinar, Working Together to Better Understand and Improve Mental Health Care Environments, will introduce the thinking behind the newly established DiMHN-NA and explore the possibilities created by genuine co-design and co-production.

What changes when we bring different perspectives together from the beginning?

Creating better mental health care environments is not the responsibility of any one profession.

People with lived experience understand these environments in ways that designers cannot.

Clinicians and caregivers see how spaces affect care, relationships and everyday practice.

Designers, researchers, facilities teams, operators, manufacturers and policymakers each bring different knowledge, priorities and constraints.

The challenge is not simply getting those perspectives into the same room.

It is learning how to work with them.

This webinar from the Design in Mental Health Network – North America (DiMHN-NA) brings together six people working across lived experience, crisis care, mental health care, operations, architecture, interior design, peer support and standards development.

Together, they will explore what becomes possible when we move beyond consultation and toward genuine co-design and co-production.

Because better mental health environments do not begin with one discipline having all the answers.

They begin with people being willing to understand the problem together.

Collaboration is more than assembling a project team

Mental health environments must respond to complex and sometimes competing considerations.

Safety matters. So do dignity, autonomy, therapeutic relationships, operational effectiveness, sensory experience, evidence, maintenance, individual needs and the ability to support healing and recovery.

Different people will understandably place different emphasis on those priorities.

Rather than treating that difference as a problem to eliminate, the webinar will ask how it can become a source of better thinking.

What is the difference between consultation, co-design and genuine co-production?

When should each be used?

Whose knowledge is missing when a project team makes an important decision?

And how can we distinguish something that is desirable from something that is genuinely essential to the quality of a mental health care environment?

How do lived experience and professional expertise inform one another without treating one as automatically more important than the other?

How do project teams work through competing priorities without losing sight of the people who will ultimately experience the environment?

These are some of the questions we will explore during this session.

One environment. Many perspectives.

A person experiencing a mental health crisis may understand a room very differently from the person delivering care within it.

An architect may see an opportunity for openness and connection.

A clinician may identify an operational or safety consideration.

A person with lived experience may notice something entirely different: whether they feel watched, welcomed, respected, restricted, calm or able to retain some sense of control.

None of those perspectives exists in isolation.

Good decisions emerge when teams can understand what sits behind them.

During the webinar, our speakers will draw on experiences ranging from the planning and design of mental health facilities to psychiatric emergency and crisis care, operations, interior environments, standards development, peer support and lived experience.

The aim is not to present one universal answer.

It is to improve the questions we ask — and the way we work together to answer them.

What you’ll gain

By the end of the webinar, attendees will have explored:

The difference between co-design and co-production, and the role each can play in developing models of care and care environments
How personal, lived and professional perspectives can reveal different priorities within the same project
Ways of using those perspectives to inform practice and strengthen multidisciplinary project teams
Why productive collaboration is about working with difference rather than simply seeking consensus
How to distinguish what is important from what is essential when creating supportive mental health care environments
Why the environment needs to be understood as part of the experience of care, rather than simply the place in which care happens
The thinking behind the newly established Design in Mental Health Network – North America (DiMHN-NA)
How DiMHN-NA hopes to connect lived experience, care, design, research and industry perspectives to improve mental health environments across North America

Six perspectives, one conversation

Moderated by Frank Pitts, Founding Principal of architecture+ and founding President of DiMHN-NA, the webinar will bring together:

Dr. Scott Zeller, Vice President of Acute Psychiatry at Vituity and creator of the EmPATH care model, bringing a clinical perspective on psychiatric emergency care and the role of therapeutic environments in supporting better crisis care.

Kevin Curtis, Operational Administrator for the Huntsman Mental Health Institute Crisis Care Center, bringing two decades of clinical and administrative experience in mental health care.

Gina Livingston-Smith, an award-winning interior designer at HDR whose work focuses on evidence-informed, human-centered health care environments.

Virginia Pankey, HOK’s Behavioral Health Practice Leader and founding Secretary of DiMHN-NA, whose work includes contributing to the development of FGI Health Guidelines.

Parker Wolff, a nationally recognized peer support workforce specialist, lived experience leader, Co-Founder of MindCareConnect and the inaugural 2024 SAMHSA STAR Peer Support Worker of the Year.

Together, the group will explore how lived experience, clinical and crisis care, operations, design, research and standards can better inform one another.

This is not about finding one professional perspective that should dominate.

It is about understanding how better environments emerge when we become more deliberate about whose knowledge shapes them, when that knowledge enters the process, and how differences are worked through.

Whether you work directly in mental health care or bring expertise from another part of the system, this session invites you to consider what your perspective contributes, and what may become visible when it comes together with others.