O. von dem Knesebeck contributes with his national surveys and health literacy interventions to the assessment and mitigation of stigmatizing attitudes towards individuals with serious mental illness. It is known that stigma, both at a societal level and self-stigma, leads to worse outcomes. Stigma and negative labeling of individuals, especially those with serious mental illness, is still a common, yet often not sufficiently recognized problem in our society.  Hence, O. von dem Knesebeck’s and C. Mahlke’s and their associated network’s research together aims at sensitizing people towards an open, tolerant and balanced view on mental health and illness, which affects every third person in Germany.

I. Scholl is an early career scientist with a junior BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Research) research group, whose mission is to improve and promote patient-centred care. Hereby, the patient’s individual, specific needs and desired outcomes are the driving force in therapy. This does not only apply to aspects of physical health, but also emotional, cognitive/ mental, spiritual, social, and financial aspects and perspectives of health service users are considered. In this realm, she and her colleagues, involving M. Härter, developed tools to assess and assure shared decision-making, which is a core aspect of patient-centred care. They contributed significantly to the implementation of patient-reported experience measures (PREMs), which explicitly focus on the service user’s perspective and experiences while receiving care, including their satisfaction with services. This is complemented by assessments that are ideally suited to assess whether service users’ desired and expected outcomes (= patient-reported outcome measures; PROMs) are achieved in therapy. PROMs and PREMs are also developed by many other researchers of the MH-TRN, e.g. B. Löwe, T. Lincoln, and A. Karow.