More than a decade ago, a small group of international mental health leaders came together around a question that was only beginning to receive serious attention: how could digital technologies help close persistent gaps in access to mental health care?
The conversation began with an eHealth working group in 2011 and grew through international collaboration over the years that followed. Early support from leaders and organisations across the USA, Canada, UK, New Zealand, Australia and Sweden helped establish the foundations for what would become the eMental Health International Collaborative (eMHIC), with Auckland University of Technology providing an early platform for its development and a growing network of international partners helping to extend collaboration across borders.
The premise was simple, but ambitious: countries were confronting many of the same challenges in mental health care, yet too often they were trying to solve them independently. Creating a trusted international space where leaders could share what was working, what was not, and what they were learning along the way offered an opportunity to accelerate progress for everyone through a simple yet the most powerful tool: “Collaboration”.
That principle remains at the heart of eMHIC today.
It Started with a Conversation
The world of digital mental health has changed enormously since those early conversations.
Digital approaches that once sat at the margins of mental health systems are increasingly part of mainstream discussions about access, prevention, service delivery, workforce capacity and system transformation. Artificial intelligence has added another dimension, bringing extraordinary possibilities alongside urgent questions of safety, equity, evidence, governance and trust.
eMHIC has evolved dramatically alongside that changing landscape.
Over the years, our international community has brought together people from across government and policy, healthcare, academia and research, technology and industry, and lived and living experience, creating opportunities for knowledge to move between disciplines, organisations and countries rather than remaining within traditional silos.
eMHIC’s flagship initiative, the Digital Mental Health International Congress and Leadership Excellence Awards, has become one of the most visible expressions of that community. What began as an invitation-only international think tank grew into a global Congress, reaching its tenth anniversary in Toronto in November 2025.
That milestone brought together 738 delegates from more than 45 countries and 178 organisations, with attendance increasing by 72% from the previous Congress. Discussions spanned connected care, responsible AI, equity and culture, lived experience and co-design, workforce development, crisis support, policy and implementation.
But the story of eMHIC has never been about one event.
At the Pulse of Global Change
Digital mental health is moving extraordinarily quickly.
Artificial intelligence is reshaping conversations about care delivery, governance, workforce capability and trust. Governments are developing new strategies and regulatory frameworks. International organisations are grappling with questions of safety, equity and implementation. New technologies and models are emerging faster than health systems can always evaluate or absorb them.
Staying close to these developments and helping the global mental health community make sense of what they mean in practice, from scalability and sustainability perspectives, has become an increasingly important part of eMHIC’s work.
Our international webinars and fireside chats provide an ongoing forum for emerging knowledge, ideas and practical experience. Our invitation-only Digital Mental Health Roundtables bring leaders together around implementation and policy challenges, while Digital Mental Health Summits connect international best practice with regional priorities. Our Knowledge Bank, newsletter and other channels help this learning reach a much wider global audience.
During 2025–26 alone, eMHIC engaged with health authorities and government ministries across multiple regions, while contributing to international conversations involving the United Nations, World Health Organization, UNICEF, World Economic Forum, McKinsey Health Institute and APEC Digital Hub for Mental Health, among others.
eMHIC also participated as a Pathfinder organisation in the World Economic Forum and McKinsey Health Institute’s Brain Economy Action Forum, placing us within a wider global conversation about the relationship between brain health, wellbeing, economies and societies.
Our collaboration with UNICEF has also entered an important new phase.
Building on years of collaboration and expert dialogue, eMHIC and UNICEF work together through the International Expert Network on Implementing Digital and AI-powered MHPSS Solutions for Children, Adolescents and Youth. The Network grew from international dialogue involving UNICEF, eMHIC and the McKinsey Health Institute and has since brought together governmental, academic, private-sector, professional and youth voices through meetings in Geneva, Ottawa and Toronto, alongside online consultations.
Underpinning this work is eMHIC’s GLOCAL — Think Globally, Act Locally — philosophy: connecting international best practice and emerging global developments with the needs, cultures and realities of individual communities and health systems.
From Conversation to Implementation
Being part of global conversations matters. But the real value of international collaboration lies in what happens next.
One recent example comes from Ireland.
eMHIC provided strategic support to Ireland’s Digital Mental Health Implementation Programme, by convening a national dialogue through an invitation-only Digital Mental Health Roundtable and Think Tank in Dublin. These brought together national and international expertise across lived experience, policy and strategy, academia, the mental health workforce and industry.
This work formed part of a much broader programme that culminated in the publication of Sharing the Vision: Ireland’s Digital Mental Health Strategy 2026–2030, launched by the Honourable Mary Butler, Minister for Mental Health, in February 2026. Ireland’s implementation work also contributes to the WHO Regional Office for Europe’s Digital Mental Health Roadmap, creating an opportunity for practical experience at national level to inform wider system learning.
The programme, including eMHIC’s contribution, was subsequently highlighted in the recently released report Built to Thrive: The Case for Investing in Community Wellbeing as an example of how digital tools can expand access while preserving human-centered care.
It is a powerful illustration of the cycle eMHIC exists to support: global knowledge informs local implementation, local experience generates new knowledge, and that learning can then travel back across borders.
Milestones Along the Way
Across more than a decade, that model of collaboration has taken many different forms. Some of the milestones along eMHIC’s journey include:
- Ten Digital Mental Health International Congresses, culminating in eMHIC25 in Toronto with 738 delegates, more than 45 countries and 178 organisations represented.
- International Roundtables, Think Tanks and Digital Mental Health Summits, connecting global expertise with practical implementation and policy challenges in individual countries and regions.
- A rapidly growing global community, with Global Community membership growing significantly, and members and partners represented across approximately 43 countries.
- An expanding collaboration with UNICEF, including the International Expert Network on Implementing Digital and AI-powered MHPSS Solutions for Children, Adolescents and Youth.
- Participation in major global forums, including the United Nations General Assembly and the World Economic Forum and McKinsey Health Institute’s Brain Economy Action Forum.
- Engagement with governments and health systems around the world, spanning Oceania, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and North America.
- Strategic support for national digital mental health development, including Ireland’s Digital Mental Health Implementation Programme and the development of Sharing the Vision: Ireland’s Digital Mental Health Strategy 2026–2030.
- A growing year-round programme of webinars, fireside chats and knowledge exchange, bringing emerging international expertise and practical experience to a global audience.
- The launch of the eMHIC Collaborative Directory in 2026, creating a dedicated international space to discover digital mental health initiatives and the organisations behind them.
- The establishment of the eMHIC Global Awards and Hall of Fame, recognising individuals, organisations and initiatives advancing digital mental health around the world.
A Place to Find a Way Forward
The next chapter of eMHIC is taking shape at a time of profound global uncertainty.
Around the world, health systems and communities are navigating economic pressures, geopolitical instability, humanitarian crises, workforce challenges and growing demand for mental health support. At the same time, technological change is accelerating at a pace few could have anticipated even several years ago.
Artificial intelligence is opening possibilities that may fundamentally reshape how mental health information, support and care are delivered. But its longer-term implications for health systems, workforces, communities and individuals, cannot yet be fully known.
In times like these, collaboration is not a luxury. It is essential infrastructure.
eMHIC has a clear mandate within this landscape: to convene international collaboration through existing alliances built on foundations of Trust.
We do not exist to prescribe a single answer to the world’s digital mental health challenges. We create trusted spaces where the people confronting those challenges can come together, across countries, sectors, disciplines and perspectives, to raise emerging issues, share experiences, challenge assumptions, examine what is working and what is not, and find practical ways forward together.
Sometimes that happens around a table. Sometimes it happens at a Congress involving hundreds of people from dozens of countries. Sometimes it brings together governments, international organisations, researchers, clinicians, technology leaders and people with lived and living experience who might otherwise never have been in the same room.
Increasingly, it also happens through the international relationships, platforms and knowledge-sharing infrastructure that allow those connections to continue long after an individual event has ended.
There is strength in that connectedness.
No country, organisation or individual can know exactly what the coming years will bring. But we can ensure that those navigating change do not have to navigate it alone.
As uncertainty increases, eMHIC will continue to stand firmly alongside our international community: creating places to connect, bringing difficult questions into the open, sharing knowledge across borders, and helping people learn from one another as new challenges emerge.
Our task is not to predict every change ahead. It is to help build an international community strong enough to respond to change together and, wherever possible, to turn uncertainty into an opportunity for better, more equitable and more human-centred mental health care.
Helping Knowledge Travel
That same purpose is shaping the infrastructure eMHIC is building for the years ahead.
An important step came earlier this year with the launch of the eMHIC Collaborative Directory, a dedicated global space for discovering digital mental health initiatives and the organisations behind them. The Directory helps make implementation activity around the world more visible, while creating new opportunities for people and organisations working on similar challenges to discover and learn from one another.
And we are continuing to build.
eMHIC is now developing what we believe will become an important part of the next stage of our mission: the Collaborative Learning Hub.
The Hub is a natural evolution of more than a decade of eMHIC’s work, creating new opportunities for global expertise, practical knowledge and implementation experience to be shared across our international community.
It will become a flagship component of eMHIC’s growing knowledge and learning infrastructure, complementing the Collaborative Directory, webinars and fireside chats, knowledge resources, roundtables, partnerships and international convening activities.
At its heart is an idea that has been part of eMHIC from the beginning: valuable knowledge should travel.
An insight developed in one health system may help another avoid years of trial and error. An implementation lesson from one country may unlock progress somewhere thousands of kilometres away. The perspective of someone with lived experience may fundamentally change how a technology or service is designed. A connection between a policymaker, researcher, clinician and innovator may become the beginning of something none could have achieved independently.
This is where international collaboration becomes especially powerful.
Learning does not simply accumulate. It compounds.
And at a time when technology, particularly artificial intelligence, is developing at extraordinary speed, our ability to find one another, share what we know and learn from experience is becoming more important than ever.
The Road to Auckland
Over the year ahead, eMHIC will continue strengthening the platforms and relationships that enable international collaboration, while deepening engagement with governments, international organisations, health systems, mental health leaders, innovators and communities around the world.
We will continue to stay close to emerging developments in technology, research, policy and implementation, creating opportunities for the people shaping and responding to change to learn from one another across borders and turn knowledge into action.
And in November 2027, our international community will come together once again for the 11th Digital Mental Health International Congress in Auckland, New Zealand, bringing the Congress back to the country where some of eMHIC’s earliest foundations were laid.
It feels like an appropriate place from which to begin the next phase of the journey. A formal launch of the eMHIC27 Congress will be made in mid-October 2027.
We cannot know exactly what the next decade of digital mental health will bring.
But we do know that we will navigate it better together.
That is the idea that brought a small international group together more than a decade ago, and it is the mandate that continues to guide eMHIC today: to convene collaboration, connect people across borders, create space for difficult questions, and help knowledge and experience travel to where they are needed.
Whatever comes next, eMHIC will continue to stand alongside our international community, listening, connecting, learning and finding a way forward together.
One world. One family. One future.
