PREMIUM Project 2026-2027: Mondriaan

The Project:

Beyond the Label: What Do Students Need to Live Well?

What does it take to live a healthy and meaningful life as a student today?
Student life is changing. Performance pressure, self-optimisation, social media and changing ways of socialising are shaping how students experience themselves and the world around them. At the same time, stress, loneliness and other mental health challenges remain common.

But should prevention only start when a mental health problem has already developed?

In this PREMIUM project, you will explore what students actually need to navigate the challenges of modern life. You will investigate themes such as connection and belonging, loneliness, performance and self-optimisation, resilience, psychological flexibility, meaning and autonomy. 
Our current prevention offer includes interventions addressing specific mental health or substance-related problems. We want to explore whether there is a gap between this problem-oriented prevention and the broader needs of students and what role prevention could play before a specific mental health problem becomes the starting point for support.

For Mondriaan, the project can provide insight into how prevention can contribute to this shift, potentially reducing escalation and pressure on specialised mental health services, while clarifying the roles of healthcare, education and the social domain.

Your challenge is not to prove that a new intervention is needed. Instead, you will investigate what is needed, what is already available, and what prevention could look like in the future.

Your findings could contribute to the future of mental health prevention at Mondriaan and may provide the foundation for developing a new preventive approach that helps students address challenges early, before they develop into more serious mental health problems.

Are you interested in the question of how we can support people before a problem becomes a diagnosis? Then this project is for you.
 

The Client:

MONDRIAAN, Department of Prevention

Mental health starts with prevention. The Prevention department is part of Mondriaan, a large mental health and addiction care organisation in the Limburg region of the Netherlands. The department works across the region to prevent mental health and substance-related problems and to strengthen mental wellbeing and resilience.

Prevention provides consultation, support, workshops and training on a wide range of topics, including anxiety, symptoms of depression, (ab)use of alcohol and/or drugs, problematic gaming and/or gambling. We support people experiencing mental health or substance-related problems, as well as people concerned about a friend or family member. We also provide information, advice and training to professionals, educational institutions, municipalities and other organisations to strengthen mental health and prevent problems at an early stage.