The Stuff of Life: Reflections on the Industry Forum

The Industry Alliance Health and Wellbeing Forum, held jointly by Mental Health Platform and DATAMIND, took place in May 2026 in London - bringing together researchers from DATAMIND, Social Health and Complex Emotions, industry leaders and individuals with lived experience of severe mental illness.

Justin is a researcher who attended the event, and shares some of his reflections from the day.

Recovering the Missing Layers of Mental Health Research

What do we miss when our models of mental health become too narrow?

At the Industry Forum on Health and Wellbeing held in London, I left with a strong sense that many of us in the room were circling around this same larger question. It stayed with me because it speaks to a tension I often feel in mental health research. We need categories, measures, outcomes, and methods; without them, research quickly becomes vague or unusable. At the same time, people do not live as diagnostic categories, trial endpoints, or data points. They live in relationships, homes, communities, routines, services, environments, and bodies. They live with histories, responsibilities, hopes, frustrations, joys, and fears. 

They live, in other words, among the stuff of life. 

If our research cannot make room for these layers of experience, even technically excellent science can end up missing something deeply important.

Empathy guiding research

For me, this was the real value of the Forum. It was not just about how academia and industry might collaborate more effectively, although that clearly matters. It was about what kind of collaboration is needed if we are serious about health and wellbeing, rather than only illness, symptoms, and treatment response. 

 

The most meaningful conversations seemed to return again and again to empathy, not as a soft or sentimental idea, but as a practical basis for better research. Empathy changes what questions we ask, which outcomes we choose, how burdensome our studies become, and whether people can recognise their own lives in the work that is meant to be for and with them.

That is also why lived experience felt so central. Involvement of people with lived experience has a much better impact when it is more than a “final check” on pre-determined plans.  

Harmony and Diversity of Voices

One conversation from the day has particularly stayed with me. We were talking about singing, and the difference between a solo voice and a choir. A solo voice can be clear, strong, and powerful. It deserves to be heard in its own right. But when a choir is properly held together, not by forcing every voice to sound the same but by allowing different voices to find relation, it can create harmonies that no single voice could produce alone. That felt like a generous metaphor for the day. 

The point of collaboration is not to blur the differences between academia, industry, lived experience, policy, services, and the third sector. It is to create the conditions in which those differences can become something richer than parallel lines of work.

This matters for translation too. We often talk about translation as if it were a pipeline from discovery to intervention to implementation. 

But some of the hardest and most important work sits between those stages: in the assumptions we make, the relationships we build, the questions we choose, and the trust we either earn or fail to earn. 

What’s next?

I left the Forum with a stronger sense that meaningful collaboration is not just about bringing different sectors into the same room, valuable though that is. It is about allowing different perspectives to change how we think and work. 

None of us can see the whole picture alone. 

But together, if we listen carefully and work with enough humility, we may be able to recover some of the missing layers of mental health research: the social, emotional, creative, relational, and everyday dimensions of what it means to live well.