Who We Are: Mental Health Education & Outreach
Promoting the cause of mental health awareness via global efforts in public and professional education
In 2016, McLean Hospital launched Deconstructing Stigma: Changing Attitudes About Mental Health, a global mental health awareness initiative focused on expanding public understanding and eliminating the stigma associated with psychiatric disorders.
Since its inception, Deconstructing Stigma has focused on using storytelling to bring communities and cultures together around a single topic: mental health and its impact.
As McLean’s education outreach program, Deconstructing Stigma continues to leverage and expand our global anti-stigma campaign while also developing public education programming and intervention curricula that increase understanding about mental health and encourage compassion for individuals and families directly affected by these disorders.
Global Education and Outreach
McLean’s Education Outreach team works with individuals and organizations around the world to deliver world-class educational offerings to health professionals and the general public. From virtual learning opportunities, to physical installations of our storytelling exhibits, there are so many ways we can work together to change attitudes about mental health.
Hi! Let’s Be Friends
Looking for mental health resources for your organization? Want to share your experiences living with mental health challenges? Interested in bringing our mobile exhibit to a location near you?
We’ve got you. Drop us a note and start a conversation.
Why We Focus On Stigma
Let’s be real—some conversations feel off-limits, wrapped in layers of taboo and discomfort. But when it comes to mental health, staying silent does more harm than good. Though it can feel insurmountable, we know we can forge a path forward.
Meet the Team
The Deconstructing Stigma team is dedicated to delivering comprehensive and accessible information about mental health to those who may need it around the world.
Custom Needs Assessment
Working with schools, universities, hospitals, corporations, and government agencies in the United States and abroad, McLean’s education outreach activities deliver a highly customized learning experience based on each organization’s needs. This includes developing on-site trainings, a curriculum, and print and digital material based on each organization’s educational goals, key audiences, and resource needs.
Unique and Effective Approach
The Deconstructing Stigma team employs a multipronged approach to introduce complex themes and discussion points around mental health and mental health stigma to lay audiences in an easily accessible and culturally sensitive manner.
This includes:
- Lived-experience storytelling by volunteers from the anti-stigma campaign, with each presentation customized to ensure optimal audience engagement based on demographics, including age and cultural background
- Expert coping skills training conducted by McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School clinicians
- Delivery of print and web-based accessible education material
- A portable and customized physical display that can be installed temporarily at each site
Reducing Stigma, Increasing Knowledge
Connecting People to Resources
Our support resource portal is a go-to spot to find local, national, and international organizations that help individuals who are struggling with their mental health.
Mental Health Affects Us All
Our anti-stigma campaign is a series of larger-than-life photographs and interviews with people from across the United States and beyond who have been affected by mental health conditions.
Since the campaign’s initial physical installation at Boston’s Logan International Airport, it has found homes in various U.S. states, and has traveled the world with pop-up installations in almost every inhabited continent. The installations, website, and the companion books serve to capture the complexity of living with a psychiatric disorder, seeking treatment, navigating insurance and healthcare systems, and facing stigma.
Told through the eyes of its participants, Deconstructing Stigma boldly challenges the misconceptions of what those with mental health disorders look like. The volunteers in this project are more than just statistics or nameless faces. They are mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, lawyers, doctors, engineers, musicians, and more. Each one has been affected by mental health challenges, and each one has also faced stigma.
Bold Images, Brave Stories
Our Global Anti-Stigma Campaign
Impact Locally and Beyond
To date, the Deconstructing Stigma team has been invited to deliver its anti-stigma messages to organization, conferences, and businesses across the United States and in multiple countries over five continents. Participants in our lived experience, stigma reduction campaign hail from around the globe.
Local, national, and international partners include the Dr. N.S. Vahia Foundation, Maine Department of Corrections, on the Move e.V., and the University of San Francisco, Quito.
Learn more about our collaborators
Let’s Collaborate
Want to help us to change attitudes about mental health? Contact us today to see how we can work together.
About McLean Hospital
Through unparalleled clinical care, innovative research, and world-class education, McLean Hospital’s more than 2,000 staff members spread across seven campuses in Massachusetts, strive to deliver on the hospital’s mission to improve the lives of people living with mental health disorders, as well as their families lives.
As the largest psychiatric affiliate of Harvard Medical School, McLean ensures its clinical work is deeply informed by research, allowing clinicians to deliver evidence-based care to the more than 6,000 patients who utilize McLean services annually.
In addition to its clinical work, McLean maintains the world’s largest psychiatric research program of any private hospital and is among the most influential psychiatric teaching hospitals in the United States.
For more than a decade, McLean Hospital has been ranked the #1 freestanding psychiatric hospital in the United States by U.S. News & World Report.
