Despite my silence on the site, we did do VMH for 2026!
Hello Peeps
It is Gareth here.
I am long overdue for a Visualising Mental Health update. In fact, I did not even manage to announce on the website that the project was happening in 2026. My tendency to attempt to juggle too many things is alive and well.
But it did happen, and it went very well.
For the second year running, our Communication Design students worked with MindSpot’s Big Five: five types of activity that research suggests are important for maintaining good mental health.
The Big Five are:
- meaningful activities
- healthy thinking
- goals and plans
- healthy routines
- social connections
We introduced this topic to students for the first time in 2025. Unfortunately, because of an administrative oversight, we did not obtain permission to feature the resulting projects on the Visualising Mental Health website. That was disappointing because there were some excellent ideas in the mix.
We made sure to address that issue this year and are now seeking permission from the 2026 students. I am hopeful that I will soon be able to share some of their work with you.
The process in 2026 followed the model we have developed over previous years.
I began by meeting with the students to introduce Visualising Mental Health, explain the project brief and teach them about the Big Five. The students were then asked to work in groups and reimagine those ideas through design.
Their challenge was to create something – an event, toy, brand, product, game, service, campaign or something else entirely – that drew inspiration from the Big Five.
Importantly, they were not simply being asked to make the topic look good. They needed to understand the psychological ideas, select an audience and consider how their creation might work in the real world.
During a couple of design studios, I visited each group to hear how their ideas were developing, answer questions and help them stay connected to the underlying mental health concepts. Students could also contact me by email, and several groups took advantage of that opportunity to test ideas or clarify aspects of the Big Five.
Their design lecturers (huge thanks to Marchelle Matthew, Lynda Kay and Martina Budimir) supported students with the visual and design aspects of their work. My role was to help keep the psychological and mental health content on track.
It is a collaboration in which everyone gets something a little different.
The students get to stretch their creative wings while working on a real-life brief.
Their lecturers get to guide them through the experience of working with a client – played, with varying degrees of competence, by me.
And I get to watch useful mental health ideas being reimagined in ways that would rarely emerge from within psychology alone.
The project concludes with a presentation day, where each group profiles what it has created and the thinking behind it. Their work is then refined and submitted for assessment.
In an ideal year, some of the strongest projects then make their way onto this website. That pipeline has been a little shaky recently, partly because of the substantial demands associated with the merger of the University of South Australia and the University of Adelaide.
Visualising Mental Health began as a UniSA project. Although the project continued through the transition, it occurred during a period of significant change for both students and staff. I am very grateful to everyone who ensured it remained part of the program.
The good news is that Visualising Mental Health appears to have survived the transition. Even better, we are looking at leaning into it more strongly in 2027 through a new program. I will share more about that when I can.
There is also another development underway at my own university, Flinders, this semester. Let’s just say that I am hoping Visualising Mental Health might eventually gain a sibling website.
The underlying idea will be similar: help people in professions outside of mental health build their mental health literacy, then invite them to explore what they can do with that knowledge through their own skills and disciplines.
For now, however, I simply wanted to provide some proof of life for 2026.
Visualising Mental Health is still happening.
Thank you to everyone who has supported the project in the past, everyone contributing to it now, and those who will become part of its future iterations.
As far as I am concerned, we are only just getting started.