The Creative Mental Health Lab is the Research & Observation Laboratory of Resilience Room – Mental Health for Creatives, dedicated to studying the mental and organizational conditions of creative work, and is currently under development.
A permanent observatory that collects data, evidence, and practices to translate scientific knowledge into concrete tools for the prevention and design of mental health within creative and cultural work environments, grounded in the new model of Creative Work Mental Ecology.
The first lab in Italy and a pioneering initiative in Europe, build on integrated lens to rethink how we support creatives, redesign conditions of work, and redefine what sustainable creativity actually requires.
The Lab is created on the initiative of the founder of Resilience Room, Fouzia Draoua, to give continuity and development to the research work on mental health within the creative world.
The Creative Sustainability
At the Creative Mental Health Lab, we focus on the creative mind as a living system — sensitive, perceptive, fast, and deeply exposed to pressure. Our philosophy starts from a simple truth: creatives don't just produce ideas, they carry them — with their attention, their emotional energy, their identity.
Mental health, in this sense, is not a parallel topic but the foundation that determines whether a creative person can stay clear, inventive and grounded over time. The Lab's mission is to understand and support this balance: protecting the mind that creates, enabling sustainable rhythms, and helping organisations recognise that long-term creative impact depends on the wellbeing of the individuals who generate it. When creatives are supported, creativity becomes not only stronger — it becomes sustainable.
This framework offers the architecture of sustainable creativity: it identifies the spaces of compatibility where people, work and creative direction can truly fit together. It is the bridge to the Compatibility Model, revealing how these systems align—or clash.
From Fragility to Compatibility
A new Paradigm in the Mental Health of Creative Work
The Compatibility Model introduces a core idea: mental health in creative professions is not a question of individual resilience, but of neuro-compatibility — the alignment between how the mind works and the system that hosts it.
The model illustrates this dynamic through two simple shapes.
The circle represents the creative mind: fluid, associative, perceptive, designed to explore possibilities.
The square represents the work system: structured, linear, shaped by processes, timelines and constraints.
- Incompatibility > When the two shapes remain separate or collide without alignment, tension builds. The system fails to support the mind, and the mind is forced to compensate, often at a cognitive and emotional cost. What emerges is not a deficit of skill, but a deficit of fit — an environment that undermines equilibrium, clarity and performance
The principle is straightforward: creativity thrives when the mind and the system are compatible. Without compatibility, even exceptional creative talent struggles to remain healthy, focused and consistently productive.
The Lab is grounded in the original concepts of Mental Ecology of Creative Work and the Compatibility Model — frameworks that did not emerge from theory alone, nor from practice in isolation, but from years of field observation, interdisciplinary study, and the need to challenge existing models that no longer explain how creatives actually function in today's environments.
These models draw on multiple domains in a way that reflects real-world complexity rather than abstract categorisation.
From work psychology, the insight into organisational dynamics and the constant negotiation between the individual and their context.
From sport psychology, the principles of activation, recovery and performance regulation that parallel the rhythms of creative intensity.
From neuroscience, an understanding of the cognitive and emotional mechanisms that make creativity possible — and vulnerable.
And from the culture of safety, the notion that mental health is not an individual responsibility but a shared system of prevention, conditions, and accountability.
— Focus Areas
- Mental Ecology
- Compatibility Model
- Creative Work
- Mental Health
- Research & Communication
Supported under the patronage of institutions committed to advancing sustainable creativity
Formats and applied practices from the Lab
Research and observation: qualitative and interdisciplinary studies on the mental health conditions of creative work.
Cultural formats and public engagement: podcasts, events, and productions that spread knowledge and language around mental health in creative work.
This podcast is the starting point — the first step in opening a conversation about creative work through the voices of creatives themselves.
Resilience Room Podcast
