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The Insight Collaborative for Mental Well-Being

"Mental health is an integral part of health; indeed, there is no health without mental health."

— World Health Organization
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We are in the midst of a growing, global mental health crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated an already significant mental health decline and a staggering increase in “deaths of despair” from suicide and drug and alcohol use. Psychological stress is rising in young people, with increasing pediatric mental health diagnoses and acute care hospitalizations. A loneliness epidemic underscores growing disconnection from ourselves, our communities, and our natural environments. The climate crisis magnifies persistent inequities and threatens lives and livelihoods worldwide. In addition, workplace stress and burnout are an enduring global problem, continuing to cause significant mental distress.

How did we get here? And how can we enhance mental and emotional well-being for everyone?

To address these critical issues, Nova has launched a new project which is convening leaders, advocates, and innovators to promote solutions for mental health and emotional well-being — with a focus on whole-person health.

The project is underpinned by a desire to advance an understanding of the dynamic forces that contribute to mental and emotional well-being and shine a light on innovative pathways to optimize health and prevent or treat conditions such as depression and PTSD. It will emphasize ways to move toward the ideals of thriving and flourishing, as well as highlight evidence-based and integrative approaches to promote well-being such as nature-based programs, mindfulness, creativity and art, nutrition, movement, and more.  

Through this work, we aim to advance both an understanding of and solutions for mental well-being, as well as to de-stigmatize mental health. 

The project’s overarching goals are to build a strong, diverse coalition; to foster interdisciplinary collaboration; and to create a platform for knowledge and resource-sharing that elevates the stories that can help shift hearts and minds toward a culture of well-being for all.

By developing and sharing proven, evidence-based success stories about ways to improve mental well-being, we hope to see increased support for funding, programs, and policies—at local, state, and national levels—that can make a real difference in people’s lives. And by demonstrating that mental well-being is a commonly shared goal, we will encourage more individuals to seek help. 

Stay tuned for updates and ways to get involved as this new project gets underway!

To support this work or learn more, please email Arianna Maysonave, project manager, at arianna@novainstituteforhealth.org.

The Insight Collaborative for Mental Well-Being project is supported by a generous seed grant from the Mental Insight Foundation.

Insight Collaborative Conversations

The Insight Collaborative project highlights innovators and pioneers in the mental well-being space, exploring stories of resilience, connection, and healing with a focus on whole-person health.

Urban Farming and Community Healing: A Conversation with Tony Hillery

Dancing To Be Free: A Conversation with Lucy Wallace

Bringing Healing to the Heart of Justice: A Conversation with Bill Brown

Read More Interviews

Healing is facilitated through safety, persistence, and trust.

  • Persistence: “People did not simply progress through this sequence and experience healing. The healing journey was a recursive, back and forth process. They found helpers, used the skills/resources that those helpers provided, found other helpers that provided more resources and used those skills and resources. As this process continued, people experienced a gradual amelioration of their suffering. Although many despaired at times, all demonstrated the quality of persistence—they refused to give up.”
  • Safety & Trust: “To connect to helpers, it was essential for people to feel safe in those relationships and able to trust that the person would be a helper and not a barrier to healing. Persons whose wounds included a violation of trust were especially careful about testing the safety of new relationships.”

Resources support us as we heal. They include reframing, responsibility, and positivity. “Making connections enabled participants to acquire and refine resources and skills that were essential in their healing journey. People also brought their own personal strengths to the journey.”

  • Reframing: “A particularly important skill was the ability to reframe—that is to look at suffering through a different lens.” This does NOT mean minimizing trauma or pain, but rather it often means the opposite: understanding what happened was wrong, unfair, or uncontrollable and that we are not to blame for it.
  • Responsibility: While we don’t have control over what happened to us, we are the only ones who can help ourselves heal. “A third essential resource that people acquired or refined was the ability to take an appropriate amount of responsibility for their healing journeys. They participated actively in the process of healing. Once again, some participants already had developed this skill, and some acquired or refined it from their helpers.”
  • Positivity: “Another resource that people acquired or refined during their healing journey was choose to be positive—that is to have some optimism about their situation.” People have varying predispositions to positivity. In the study, positivity was important in helping people heal. This doesn’t mean a toxic positivity, but rather simply finding some good in life and feeling hopeful about our situations.

“Connection to others was an essential part of all the healing journeys.” Humans are social creatures, and even the most introverted of us need close relationships. Friends and family add meaning and value to life and help support us, in good times and bad. 

When we experience relational trauma, relationships can feel scary, but reestablishing safety and trust in relationships is where the healing happens. (To be clear, we do not mean reestablishing safety and trust with abusers, but rather finding other healing relationships.) 

“When safety and trust had been established, people were able to connect with helpers. The nature of the behaviours of helpers that fostered healing ranged from small acts of kindness to unconditional love.”

  • “Moving from being wounded, through suffering to healing, is possible. It is facilitated by developing safe, trusting relationships and by positive reframing that moves through the weight of responsibility to the ability to respond.”
  • “Relationships with health professionals were among these but were not necessarily any more important to the healing journey than other kinds of helpers, which included family members, friends, spirituality and their God, pets, support groups, administrators, case workers and supervisors.”

Healing probably means different things to different people, but one definition that emerged from the study is: “The re-establishment of a sense of integrity and wholeness.” 

Healing was an emergent property that resulted from each individuals’ complex healing journey, a result of bridged connections between resources and relationships. “…they gradually found relief from suffering and began to exhibit emergent characteristics: a sense of hope, self-acceptance, and a desire to help others—the immediate precursors to healing.”

 In varying degrees, “they were able to transcend their suffering and in some sense to flourish.” 

  • Helping Others: We find meaning in helping others. “Understanding that suffering gives the strength and experience to help others in similar situations.”
  • Hope: We begin to have hope that we will not always feel this bad. A Crohn’s patient said, “I think gradually I realized that I was going to feel better. I did have days when I actually didn’t vomit, when I did feel better. And I think gradually I came to believe that maybe I could have a normal life again.”
  • Self-Acceptance: We see our inherent value and understand that we are not to blame for our suffering. A participant living with HIV said, “I’m really proud of myself. I think that now I still want to live. I don’t want to die, and I really love myself a lot. I have a lot of comfort in myself.”

Suffering is the ongoing pain from wounding. 

There is some debate about whether people always experience suffering on the path to healing.

Wounding happens when we experience physical or emotional harm. It can stem from chronic illness or by physical or psychological trauma for which we do not have the tools to cope, or a combination of those factors. 

“The degree and quality of suffering experienced by each individual is framed by contextual factors that include personal characteristics, timing of their initial or ongoing wounding in the developmental life cycle and prior and current relationships.”

Characteristics: How predisposed someone may be to wounding/how many tools and resources someone may have to deal with trauma/illness.

Lifestages: Developmental timing plays an important role in the impact of trauma — young children often do not have the same resources as older adults.

Relationships: Relationships can provide solace and support for those suffering, while lack of healthy relationships can prolong suffering.