Museums Emerge as Mental Health Partners Through Social Prescribing and Dementia Programs

Key facts

• The Vancouver Art Gallery's Art of Wellbeing Lab partnered with PaRx to allow doctors to prescribe visits to the Emily Carr exhibition, covering the patient and a guest.
• In the UK, approximately one in five GP appointments involve non-medical issues such as loneliness, anxiety, or low mood.
• Archaeology on Prescription in York invites NHS-referred participants to join excavations in groups of no more than six.
• The Stapferhaus in Lenzburg, Switzerland, partnered with Klinik Barmelweid for From Me to We, a two-evening group therapy experiment with thirty strangers and group analyst Joram Ronel.
• House of Memories at National Museums Liverpool has run since 2012, offering a Memory Suitcase Loan Service and an app; its mobile museum, On the Road, has welcomed over 6,000 people since 2021.
• The V&A adapted UCL's Cognitive Stimulation Therapy into a 14-week museum program with the NHS Memory Service and Resonate Arts, and its Gilbert Collection galleries reopened in March 2026 with touchable materials and custom scents.
• Frederiksberg Museums and Roskilde University run See Listen Talk for psychiatric service users aged 18 to 29, focusing on slow looking.
• The Getty's Mindful Moment for Staff sessions, led by Lilit Sadoyan, provided staff a space to process the Los Angeles fires of early 2025.