Connecting research and practice: Fondation FondaMental in the ReConnected project

Since RECONNECTED project began in 2023, Fondation FondaMental has been one of the projects’s partners. The European research project explores how societal changes influence mental health wellbeing and develops a digital support platform to support vulnerable populations. This article looks at how the project aligns with the Fondation’s long-standing work in mental health research and innovation.

The ReConnected project

ReConnected is a research project funded by Horizon Europe, the European Union’s research program. It brings together 11 partner institutions working in clinical and developmental psychology, environmental and social psychiatry, digital mental health, and data science.

The project is based on the thesis: today’s societal changes (climate change, digitalization, conflict, migration, an aging population) can affect people’s mental health wellbeing across Europe, but their impact may not be the same for everyone. The way people experience these changes depends on many factors, including their living conditions, age, social environment, access to support, and the places where they live.

To better understand these differences, ReConnected studies how multiple factors interact to shape mental health. This includes individual factors, such as personal characteristics and experiences, as well as wider social, environmental, and societal influences. This approach helps researchers move beyond looking at single causes and instead consider the complex realities that affect people’s mental well-being.

Based on this understanding, the project is developing and testing digital tools designed to be non-stigmatizing and easy to use. These tools target 9 vulnerable groups across several European countries, each adapted to its local context. In France, the project focuses on adults living in low socioeconomically disadvantaged areas.

Fondation FondaMental : Advancing mental health research

Created in 2007 from an initiative developed by the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, Fondation FondaMental was established to accelerate research on severe mental sickness (schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, treatment-resisting depression, autism spectrum disorder without intellectual disability) by building cooperation between hospitals and research laboratories.

Since then, the Fondation expanded its missions, collaborating with multiple partners. Today, it works in four main areas:

• Stimulating research: The Fondation works with multiple partners and research teams in France, Europe and internationally to advance psychiatry research and deepen our understanding of both mental health and mental illness.
• Providing tools to clinicians and researchers: The Fondation provides a set of tools, training, conferences and support inside a professional network to strengthen research in psychiatry.
• Supporting patients and caregivers: Since the 2010s, the Fondation has deployed a nationwide network of Expert Centers, offering patients access to precise and structured diagnosis pathways.
• Raising awareness to disrupt prejudice on mental illness: Using its website, digital platforms, social media, and regular communication, the Fondation works to challenge prejudice and reduce stigmatization around mental illness.

Where ReConnected project and the Fondation meet

ReConnected overlaps with several areas the Fondation already works on. The clearest link is digital tools: both use them to prevent problems and to support people.

Designing tools around people’s needs

The ReConnected project focuses on understanding and improving the mental well-being of vulnerable populations. In France, the target group is people residing in low socioeconomic status areas. This mirrors an approach the Fondation has already developed through its own digital ecosystem, which includes platforms and applications each designed for a specific audience: My-Mood (MyMood | Le Hub de Ressources santé mentale pour les Jeunes.) for 15–25 year-olds, LENA (Nous connaitre — LENA) for perinatal mental health, MiaMental (MIAMENTAL) for women’s mental health across the lifespan, and SIMPLe+ (Actualités | Fondation FondaMental) for people living with bipolar disorder, among others. The logic is the same one ReConnected is built on: a generic tool rarely serves a specific population well, so the starting point has to be the population itself.

Responding to a changing world

ReConnected’s central idea, that large-scale societal change affects mental health, is one the Fondation has already had to act on. When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine displaced large numbers of people to France, the Fondation launched Ecoute Psy Ukraine (Plateforme Écoute Psy UKRAINE), a platform with Ukrainian-language resources to help displaced people, mostly women and children, understand and manage trauma-related mental health difficulties. A similar platform, Peace of MINDS.info (Plateforme Peace of Minds), was later created to support people affected by the Israel–Hamas conflict. Both show, on a small scale, what ReConnected is testing more broadly: sudden societal disruption calls for fast, targeted digital support.

Working with local communities

ReConnected aims to adapt each intervention as precisely as possible to its target population. The French research team illustrates this approach well. While it brings expertise in psychiatry and mental health research, it also works closely with local professionals and community organizations that understand the target population’s everyday realities. This partnership helps the team adapt its research as closely as possible to the realities of the population it is studying. Concretely, this collaboration shapes the team’s work in a few ways:

• a better understanding of the risk factors that actually affect this population, rather than assuming they are the same as in other groups
• better detection of subclinical symptoms, early, mild signs of a disorder that local actors, through their regular contact with the population, are well placed to notice
• and studying environmental factors through collaborations such as the one with LISA (Laboratoire Interuniversitaire des Systèmes Atmosphériques), allowing researchers to relate mental health outcomes to measured environmental exposures rather than assumptions.

This environmental focus reflects a point ReConnected is built on: mental health is shaped by where people live and what they are exposed to, not only by individual or biological factors.

Building on shared expertise

The collaboration between Fondation FondaMental and ReConnected illustrates a principle both organizations already work by: mental health support is more effective when it is built around a specific population rather than designed as a one-size-fits-all solution. The Fondation brings to this collaboration years of experience running population-specific digital tools and a nationwide network of Expert Centers; ReConnected, in turn, places this experience within a wider European comparison across nine vulnerable groups, testing whether this population-specific approach holds up across very different contexts and countries.

Beyond this particular project, ReConnected is a useful illustration of a broader shift in mental health research: away from generic interventions, and toward tools that are adapted to where people live, what they are exposed to, and the specific pressures they face. As societal change continues to reshape mental health wellbeing across Europe, this kind of locally grounded, population-specific research is likely to become even more relevant.