Why Museums Matter for Mental Health and Well-Being

Doctors are prescribing gallery visits. Care homes are receiving museum collections. People living with dementia are reliving Eurovision classics with a mobile museum. Here is why museums have become some of the most powerful wellbeing spaces we have.

Most of us who work in museums have felt it. A visitor lingers in front of a painting and leaves looking lighter. A regular at the Tuesday tour turns out to have no one else to talk to all week. A family member tells you their mother, who rarely speaks now, lit up at the sight of an old tin toy.

For a long time, these moments were treated as pleasant side effects. That is changing fast. As health systems strain under rising demand for mental health support, and as loneliness is increasingly recognised as a public health issue in its own right, museums are stepping forward as genuine partners in care.

Sirish Rao, interim co-CEO of the Vancouver Art Gallery, called mental health the widespread challenge of our times at a recent MuseumNext event. Museums, with their calm spaces, their trusted public status and collections that spark memory and conversation, are unusually well placed to respond. Here is what that looks like in practice, drawn from institutions leading the way around the world.

1. Museums Are Becoming Part of the Prescription

Social prescribing starts from a simple truth: not every health need can be met with medication. In the UK, around one in five GP appointments involve non-medical issues such as loneliness, anxiety or low mood. Social prescribing connects those patients to community activities instead, and museums are proving to be some of the most effective places to send them.

The Vancouver Art Gallery has taken the idea somewhere genuinely new. Through its Art of Wellbeing Lab, it partnered with PaRx, Canada’s national nature prescription programme, so that any registered doctor can prescribe a patient a visit to the gallery’s Emily Carr exhibition. Every prescription covers the patient and a guest, a deliberate choice so that no one goes alone. Prescribed visitors receive a slow-looking guide that invites them to engage all five senses and carry that attention back into nature outside the gallery walls.

The gallery’s Lead Wellbeing Consultant, Paula Toledo, knows the power of this approach first-hand. Years ago, grieving the loss of her husband with two small children at home, her doctor referred her not to medication but to a community connector who helped her rediscover music and movement. She describes the experience as transformational.

Prescriptions do not have to mean paintings. In York, Archaeology on Prescription invites people referred through the NHS to join real excavations, working alongside professional archaeologists in groups of no more than six. Participants describe the steady rhythm of sieving and trowelling as calming, and at least one has gone on to volunteer. One participant, Amber, says the work helps her focus, and every so often you find something amazing.

The lesson for museums: you don’t need a gallery full of masterpieces. You need a clear referral route, small groups, trained staff and a genuine partnership with health providers.

2. Museums Are an Antidote to Loneliness

Loneliness does not always look like isolation. It can sit quietly inside a busy life, and it rarely announces itself. Museums are uniquely good at gently breaking it, because they give strangers something to talk about.

At the Stapferhaus in Lenzburg, Switzerland, visitors to its exhibition on health began asking whether they could join a group therapy session. Rather than brush the idea aside, the museum partnered with Klinik Barmelweid to run From Me to We, a two-evening experiment in which thirty strangers sat in a circle with a group analyst, Joram Ronel, and no script at all. By the second evening, participants were talking openly about loneliness and their longing to connect. Ronel found it deeply moving that this happened inside a museum.

For some people, getting to a museum at all is the barrier. Tees Valley Museums in England turned that around with Museum in Your Care Home, bringing handling objects, activity packs and repurposed school loan boxes directly to residents. Care staff noticed withdrawn residents starting to chat in the corridors. One group’s seaside-inspired collages ended up displayed in a museum exhibition, a powerful signal that their stories mattered.

The programme also challenges an uncomfortable attitude in the sector: that older audiences aren’t worth investing in because they aren’t the future. For the people in those care homes, the museum’s visit may be the most meaningful conversation of their week.

The lesson for museums: connection is the product. Build programmes around conversation, not just content, and be willing to go to people who cannot come to you.

3. Museums Help Hold On to the Stories Dementia Threatens

Nearly one million people in the UK live with dementia, a figure expected to reach 1.4 million by 2040. Museums, full of objects that carry memory, are proving to be remarkable places of connection for people living with the condition and for those who care for them.

Since 2012, House of Memories at National Museums Liverpool has shown what is possible. Its free Memory Suitcase Loan Service lets care professionals run their own reminiscence sessions, and its app holds thousands of objects from around the world. Its mobile museum, On the Road, has welcomed more than 6,000 people since 2021, bringing forests, railways and even Eurovision to care home residents who could no longer go out to the city’s celebrations. Programme Manager Lizzie Ward reports improvements in mobility and in both verbal and non-verbal communication among participants.

The V&A has adapted UCL’s Cognitive Stimulation Therapy into a 14-week museum programme, run with the NHS Memory Service and Resonate Arts, alongside monthly Closer Look tours focused on just two or three objects, with tactile materials, scents and tea. When redesigning its Gilbert Collection galleries, the museum consulted people living with dementia directly. Their enthusiasm for touch and smell shaped the redesigned galleries, which reopened in March 2026 with touchable materials and custom-blended scents. The plans included the V&A’s first permanent scent feature: the aroma of nutmeg beside an ornate cowrie-shell nutmeg grater.

Both programmes share one principle. People living with dementia are, as Ward puts it, experts by experience. They are co-creators, not just recipients.

The lesson for museums: multisensory design built with people living with dementia makes galleries better for everyone. Start by asking them what they need.

4. Museums Teach Us to Slow Down, Including Their Own Staff

Few places in modern life ask us to simply stop and look. That quiet invitation, known in the sector as slow looking, is turning out to be one of the most powerful wellbeing tools museums have.

In Denmark, Frederiksberg Museums partnered with Roskilde University on See Listen Talk, a programme for psychiatric service users aged 18 to 29, many still in hospital. Sessions ran outside opening hours, with a co-therapist present and participants free to leave at any time. The focus was on noticing lines, textures, even sounds and temperature, rather than interpreting. Early research findings show participants using slow looking as a coping strategy, finding new meaning in their experiences and feeling less isolated through the group conversations that followed.

And the benefits need not stop at visitors. The Getty has spent years helping the public slow down with art, so museum educator Lilit Sadoyan turned those practices inward. Her Mindful Moment for Staff sessions invite colleagues from conservation, operations, education and beyond to start their working day with meditation and mindful looking in the galleries before the museum opens. After the Los Angeles fires of early 2025, these mornings became a place for staff to gather and gently process what had happened. In a pilot workshop with conservators, several participants reported feeling joy, a feeling that can easily get lost under daily pressure.

The lesson for museums: calm is one of your most valuable assets. Protect it for vulnerable visitors, and remember that the people delivering wellbeing programmes need care too.

Museums Belong in the Conversation About Health

These programmes range from national institutions to regional services, but what they share is a willingness to partner with doctors, therapists and care workers, to listen to the people they serve, and to take seriously something museum professionals have always sensed: that time spent with objects, stories and each other is good for us.

At the Vancouver Art Gallery, Elder in Residence Skwetsimeltxw Willard (Buddy) Joseph offered a perspective that reframes the whole debate. In Indigenous thinking, he pointed out, treating art and healing as separate things is the real anomaly.
As health systems look for new ways to support mental health, ease loneliness and care for an ageing population, museums have a compelling case to make. The evidence is growing, the models are tested and replicable, and the need has never been greater. We need museums for our wellbeing, now more than ever.

Want to explore this work in depth? Discover more stories in our Health & Well-Being section and join practitioners from around the world at the Museums, Health & Well-Being Summit.