Winner
The Global Mental Health Community Summit 2025: Redefining Mental Healthcare Together
by Burson for Boehringer Ingelheim
Summary of work
For nearly 1 billion people, chronic and complex mental illnesses mean facing profound injustice: deeply underfunded care, pervasive stigma, and systemic exclusion. These challenges are compounded by a history where the mental health community has been talked about, not listened to, leaving advocacy fragmented and innovation stifled.
To address this, Boehringer Ingelheim, with Burson, Patvocates, and global patient leaders, co-created the Global Mental Health Community Summits (2024-2025): educational patient meetings designed to strengthen, unite, and mobilise the global mental health community. From the outset, the Global Mental Health Community Summit was designed as a multi‑year, patient‑powered and co-created educational platform consisting of capacity‑building workshops, regional co‑creation sessions, interactive panels, and expert input, providing attendees with a space to learn and practice skills. The commitment to co-creation formed the foundation for the summits, guaranteeing that every discussion and outcome was directly rooted in authentic lived experience and genuine community needs.
Bringing together 60 patients and advocates from over 25 countries, these summits supported unprecedented cross-border collaboration and generated practical tools for change. These summits not only unified a fragmented community but firmly established Boehringer Ingelheim as a recognised leader and trusted partner in authentic, patient-centric mental health engagement.
Judges’ comments
‘The Global Mental Health Community Summit 2025’ stands out as a bold and highly credible model for patient-led engagement at scale. It is strong, thoughtful and patient embedded – a programme to be proud of! It is an extremely impressive global meeting that demonstrated clear outcomes that will impact patient care beyond the meeting. It is a powerful, purpose-led initiative that places genuine patient co-creation at the heart of global mental health advocacy. It includes memorable creative touches, including the discovery and commitment walls, showcasing (and no doubt motivating) grass roots action. The programme demonstrates strong strategic clarity and early evidence of real-world mobilisation for advocacy, moving beyond education into meaningful systemic influence.
