Better mental health environments begin with better conversations
DiMHN-NA brings together people with lived and living experience, clinicians, architects, designers, health systems, facilities professionals, researchers, manufacturers, industry partners, and policymakers to improve the places where mental and behavioral health care happens.
We believe empathetic, evidence-informed, and genuinely collaborative design can create better opportunities for care, connection, healing, and recovery.
Because every environment communicates something.
- You are valued.
- You are safe here.
- You have choices.
- Your needs have been considered.
- You belong.
Why design matters
Mental and behavioral health environments are more than buildings in which care happens. Their design can influence privacy and dignity, feelings of safety, opportunities for connection, and the degree of choice and control people experience.
They also shape the everyday experience of clinicians and staff delivering care.
Safety is fundamental. But safety does not need to be considered separately from dignity, autonomy, recovery, or human connection.
- Does it feel safe?
- Does it support recovery?
- Does it preserve dignity?
- Does it help staff provide good care?
- Does it give people meaningful choices?
- Were the people who will experience it involved in creating it?
Different expertise. Shared purpose.
DiMHN-NA is building a multidisciplinary community around a common goal: creating safer, more therapeutic, and more humane mental and behavioral health environments. We bring together:
- Mental health clinicians bringing insight into care, recovery, trauma-informed practice, patient and staff safety, and the realities of delivering care every day.
- Architects and designers translating human needs, clinical models, evidence, and operational requirements into environments that work in practice.
- Facilities leaders bringing essential knowledge of operations, safety, maintenance, investment, and long-term performance.
- People with lived experience contributing expertise developed through firsthand experience of mental health, substance-use, and related care systems.
- Suppliers and industry partners developing products, technologies, and solutions in response to the complex needs of mental and behavioral health environments.
- Researchers and academics helping connect emerging knowledge with the decisions being made in real places.
- Government officials, systems leaders, and influencers connecting beyond their own geographic limits to create a forum where their work can be influenced by other stakeholders and where their foresight can flourish, find support, and be emulated.
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What we focus on
Safety + therapeutic value
Safety matters deeply in mental and behavioral health design. So do dignity, autonomy, usability, and recovery.
We want to advance conversations about patient and staff safety, environmental risk, and ligature risk reduction while asking what it takes to create environments that are both safer and more supportive of therapeutic care.
Lived experience + co-production
People who have experienced mental health and behavioral health environments firsthand hold knowledge that cannot be replaced by professional expertise.
We advocate for meaningful involvement from the beginning, when needs are being identified and briefs are being developed, through design, delivery, and evaluation.
Not designing for people and asking what they think afterward. Designing with people from the start.
Recovery + trauma-informed design
An environment can support a sense of agency, calm, connection, and belonging, or unintentionally reinforce distress, restriction, and loss of control.
We want to explore how trauma-informed and recovery-oriented approaches can inform the places where people receive care and where staff work.
Knowledge + shared learning
North America has extraordinary expertise across healthcare, design, facilities, academia, lived experience, and industry. But that knowledge does not always travel easily between disciplines.
DiMHN-NA creates opportunities to exchange ideas, challenge assumptions, share emerging practice, and learn across professional and geographic boundaries.
A North American Network with an international connection
DiMHN-NA has developed in collaboration with the UK’s Design in Mental Health Network, an established charity dedicated to improving mental health outcomes through better design.
Our organizations have established a partnership for coordinated action, mutual support, and shared intellectual property.
This relationship gives the North American Network opportunities to learn from established resources, evidence, and experience while developing conversations and approaches relevant to the distinct healthcare systems, standards, practices, and communities of the United States, Canada, and wider North America.
Join a growing multidisciplinary community
Improving mental and behavioral health environments requires people who see the challenge from different angles.
Whether you deliver care, design environments, manage facilities, develop products, conduct research, make investment decisions, or bring expertise through lived experience, there is a place for your perspective in DiMHN-NA.
Membership is an opportunity to:
- Connect across professions and disciplines.
- Exchange knowledge and emerging practice.
- Learn from lived and professional experience.
- Build relationships with others committed to better mental health environments.
- Contribute ideas, projects, and lessons from practice.
- Help strengthen the conversation about mental and behavioral health design across North America.
Events
Our events bring together different perspectives to explore the questions shaping mental and behavioral health design in North America. Join clinicians, people with lived experience, architects, designers, facilities leaders, researchers, and industry partners to learn, share, and challenge established thinking.
Test Event
News + Insights
Explore perspectives, projects, emerging evidence, lived experience, and practical learning from across mental and behavioral health design.
For much of Francis Pitts’ career, the challenge wasn’t convincing himself that the design
Every line we draw can define the life of another. For architect Stephen Parker,
Meet our Board
DiMHN-NA is guided by a Board bringing together deep experience and a shared commitment to improving mental and behavioral health environments.
Better environments will not come from one profession working alone.
They will come from bringing lived experience, clinical knowledge, design expertise, operational insight, evidence, and industry innovation into the same conversation.
If you believe mental health environments should help people feel valued, safe, heard, and supported, become part of the Network.
Together, we can design better opportunities for care, connection, healing, and recovery.
