On Friday, June 6, 2025, we presented the Citizenship as Mental Health project at the 29th Congress of the Spanish Association of Neuropsychiatry – Mental Health Professionals (AEN), held at the Bizkaia Aretoa in Bilbao.
Our participation consisted of an oral presentation entitled “Citizenship as Mental Health: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Awareness-Raising Activities for Mental Health Professionals.” In this presentation, we discussed the progress and lessons learned from the Citizenship as Mental Health project, which has been ongoing in Catalonia for three years. The project aims to rethink psychological distress through the lens of citizenship, participation, and human rights.
During the presentation, we shared the conceptual model developed over the course of the project, the participatory methodology employed, and the initial results of the training intervention trial with mental health professionals. We emphasized how the citizenship framework enables a redefinition of service goals—shifting from a symptom-centered approach to one that foregrounds the rights, resources, relationships, roles, and responsibilities of service users.