Social Change Conference 2025: Peer Support & Mental Health
In May 2025, as part of our shared commitment to rethinking mental health and peer-led support, two members from the Netherlands and two from Ireland traveled to Iceland to participate in Social Change conference 2025, held in Reykjavík.
What is Social Change 2025?
Social Change is a gathering aimed at exploring alternatives to the dominant psychiatric model of mental health. Through workshops, presentations, and dialogue, it brings together people with lived experience of emotional distress or addictions, practitioners, activists, and thinkers. The goal: to spark social and systemic transformation in how we understand and support well-being.
The conference was held May 15–16 at the Hilton Reykjavík Nordica, with a full schedule of workshops and keynote talks.
Our Team’s Experience
For Traustur Kjarni, the visit was both inspiring and deeply grounding. Our partners from the Netherlands and Ireland joined Icelandic peers to:
Sit in on interactive workshops focused on non-clinical approaches to distress
Share personal narratives and peer-led practices
Engage in dialogues about change — how systems might shift toward dignity, autonomy, connection
Attend keynote talks from experienced voices in the movement toward mental health alternatives
This inter-country exchange reinforced that although mental health systems differ, many of the same challenges surface: how to stay human in systems built around diagnosis, how to ensure access to voice and agency, how to integrate peer support without tokenism.
Insights & Takeaways
From this visit, we carry back several reflections:
The power of story: Hearing personal journeys of distress, recovery, resistance, and transformation can cut through institutional distance.
Solidarity across borders: Despite cultural and systemic differences, we see common ground in questions about autonomy, care, and community.
Experimentation matters: Systems change doesn’t wait for perfect solutions. The conference affirmed that small experiments—peer-led groups, alternative care spaces, collaborative design—are seeds of bigger change.
Role of inclusion: True transformation must include those with lived experience, not as token voices but as equal participants in design, decision-making, and ownership.
What’s Next
This visit is part of our ongoing effort to weave peer-led, nature-based, socially grounded approaches into mental health support. We will continue to share lessons, experiment with local practices, and build bridges across countries so that we can imagine and create more humane systems together.
This activity took place within the framework of the Roots for Support project, co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union and supported by the Icelandic National Agency (Landskrifstofa Erasmus+).