These conversations matter. They have made mental health less invisible than it once was. But I sometimes wonder if we have become so focused on encouraging people to speak that we have forgotten the other half of the conversation: listening.

Because telling someone, “You can talk to me,” is easy. Actually listening to what they say, believing their experience and allowing it to change how we respond is much harder. That is where the conversation around mental health needs to go next.

Every year on 10 October, World Mental Health Day reminds us that mental health deserves the same attention as physical health.

As mental health becomes a more familiar part of public conversation, an important question remains: are we becoming better at understanding people who struggle, or simply better at talking about their struggles?

Someone can tell their family that they are struggling and still be told to “think positively”. A student can explain that they are overwhelmed and still be expected to perform as usual. An employee can speak about burnout and return to the same workload the next morning.

In each case, the person has spoken. The problem is that nobody really listened.

Listening does not simply mean staying quiet while someone talks. It means taking their experience seriously enough to reconsider our assumptions, decisions and systems.

That distinction is becoming particularly important as mental health moves from being treated only as a personal issue to being recognised as a social and institutional one.

The theme of World Mental Health Day 2026 is “Lived experiences heard: real voices, real change.” The focus is significant because people who have experienced mental health difficulties are not merely recipients of mental health services. They also have knowledge about what those services feel like, where they fail and what could make them better.

A policy can look effective on paper and still be difficult to access. A university can have a counselling centre and still make a struggling student feel uncomfortable asking for help. A workplace can offer mental health leave and still create a culture where taking it feels like admitting weakness.

These gaps are difficult to identify from policies and statistics alone. They become visible when we listen to the people who experience them.

This is why lived experience should not be treated as an emotional addition to mental health discussions. It can be a form of expertise.

Someone who has navigated depression, experienced a panic disorder, supported a family member through a mental health crisis or struggled to access treatment understands parts of the system that an outside observer may never see.

Listening to those experiences can make mental health services more practical, humane and responsive.

This matters far beyond hospitals

Mental health is often discussed as though responsibility begins and ends with doctors, psychologists and counsellors. They are essential, but our everyday environments also shape how people experience mental wellbeing.

Consider a university student.

Their mental health may be affected by academic pressure, financial uncertainty, family expectations, loneliness, competition or the fear of falling behind. A counselling service can help, but counselling alone cannot remove every source of that pressure.

The same applies to workplaces.

An employee may be offered access to therapy while continuing to face unrealistic deadlines, poor management or an environment where taking a mental health break is frowned upon.

If institutions genuinely want to support mental health, they need to listen to what people are actually experiencing inside them.

That could mean asking students what prevents them from using counselling services rather than simply announcing that the services exist. It could mean asking employees what contributes to burnout instead of organising another wellbeing seminar. It could mean involving people with lived experience when designing mental health policies rather than consulting them after all the major decisions have already been made.

Listening changes the question from “What programme should we provide?” to “What are people actually telling us they need?” That is a much more useful question.

Bangladesh has its own listening gap

In Bangladesh, mental health conversations are becoming more visible, but access and acceptance remain complicated.

People may still hesitate to seek professional support because of stigma, cost, limited services or concerns about how family and society will react. For many, acknowledging a mental health problem can feel more difficult than living with it silently.

That makes listening especially important.

Sometimes it begins with something very ordinary: not dismissing someone’s anxiety as overthinking, not treating sadness as a lack of gratitude, and not assuming that someone who looks fine must be fine.

But listening also has to move beyond individual relationships.

If young people repeatedly say that academic pressure is affecting their wellbeing, universities need to consider what that tells them about the learning environment. If employees repeatedly describe exhaustion, organisations need to examine the conditions producing it. If people seeking mental health care repeatedly encounter barriers, policymakers need to hear those experiences when designing services.

Awareness becomes meaningful when it produces change.

One of the biggest barriers to listening is the belief that we need to fully understand another person’s experience before we can take it seriously. We do not.

I may not know what someone’s depression feels like. I may never understand exactly what it is like to live with severe anxiety or to recover from a mental health crisis. But I can believe that their experience is real. That is an important difference.

Good listening does not always require the perfect response. Sometimes it means resisting the urge to give advice immediately. Sometimes it means asking what kind of support someone wants. Sometimes it means accepting that recovery does not follow the timeline we would prefer.

Most importantly, it means allowing someone’s experience to matter. Mental health awareness has spent years asking people to break their silence. That was necessary.

Perhaps the next step is to make sure that speaking up actually leads somewhere. If people share their experiences but institutions continue making decisions without them, we have created a conversation without influence.