World Mental Health Day falls on 10 October. The World Federation for Mental Health chose Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change as the 2026 theme, and asks that events on the day support the World Health Organization's work on deinstitutionalisation.
It is a theme that reads quickly as a slogan. It is worth reading slowly, because it has a practical consequence for any service: listening is not asking once. It is asking, writing down what the person said, and letting that change what happens next.
Listening starts before the session
In a non-pharmacological activity, the first question is the simplest and the one most often skipped: what does this person want? Not what usually works with other residents, and not what the team finds calming.
In a virtual reality system this has a concrete form: who chooses the scene. If it is always the team, the session is something done to the person. If it is the person, or someone who knows them well, it is something done with them. We wrote about how to choose in meaningful activity: how a scene is chosen.
Listening during: stop when the person wants
The session ends when the person wants it to end, not when the scene does. It sounds obvious. In practice it means whoever is with them watches the person, not the screen, and that stopping halfway is not treated as a failure.
Listening after: write their words, not ours
This is where the theme becomes checkable. After a session, what gets written down?
- A useful note records what the person said and did: "Asked for the sea. Talked about Nazaré and her father. Wanted to do it again tomorrow."
- A useless note says "VR session done".
- A note that should not be written draws conclusions nobody measured: "the session reduced anxiety".
The device does not assess or measure emotional states. What it records is operational: what was played, when, for how long, whether it was stopped. The person's words only stay if someone writes them down. We explained how in the session and the patient's clinical record.
Listening has to change something
The second half of the theme, "real change", is the one that gets forgotten. If the person said the sea bores them and next week it is the beach again, they were heard and nobody did anything with it.
A simple rule for the team: before each session, read the note from the last one.
What this is not
A comfort session in virtual reality is not psychotherapy and should not be presented as such. The difference, and why it matters, is in virtual reality and mental health: two different things. The place of non-pharmacological care in the Portuguese system is in mental health in Portugal.
In short
- The 2026 theme is hearing lived experience, and doing something with it.
- Listening starts with the choice: who picks the scene?
- The session ends when the person wants.
- Write down the person's words, not conclusions nobody measured.
- Read the previous note before the next session.
The RVer platform's base product is a Class I Medical Device registered with Infarmed. Sessions are run by the institution's own professionals, complement existing care and do not replace assessment, treatment or clinical follow-up.