Mental disorders (MD) have an enormous impact in our society. A holistic approach to mental health promotion and care provision is then needed since individuals with MD are defined not just alone but in relation to other members of the community: caregivers, relatives and friends, all of them holding different but relevant roles. Thus, we have designed an experimental setup by means of citizen science practices that probes into the complexity of the interdependencies at play within the mental health ecosystem. Together with community members, we have chosen a suite of games: Prisoner’s dilemma (PD), Trust Game (TG), and Collective Risk Dilemma (CRD). The selected social dilemmas capture different behavioral traits (Cooperation, Optimism, Trust, Reciprocity, and sense of Collectivity). We find that caregivers show a remarkably larger disposition towards sustaining cooperation within groups. Also, members of the mental health ecosystem do not equally contribute and benefit from collective action. Our experiments show that persons with MD are the ones who contribute the most to the public good: they make larger efforts towards reaching the collective goal, thus playing a leading role for the functioning of the ecosystem but also unveiling their vulnerability in front of other community members.
