Dance Mental Health Assessment Tool (DMHAT) – student is a Health & Performance initiative with the collaboration and support of DMHAT lead-researcher Justine Benoit-Piau at the Department of Public and Occupational Health, Amsterdam UMC and Sherbrooke University (Quebec, Canada). 

In 2020, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) published the validated Sports Mental Health Assessment Tool (SMHAT). In 2023, the IOC gave its blessing for a sister tool to be developed with it as foundation - the Dance Mental Health Assessment Tool (DMHAT). The DMHAT has been developed by Justine Benoit-Piau and team and part of this process has been funded by a postdoc bursary from Amsterdam UMC and supervised by Professor Evert Verhagen. The DMHAT has been developed for professional dancers (mostly classical), triages for ill mental health and its validation is due to be complete in May 2025.  

Ornellas Pinto initiated the DMHAT-student in late 2024, working with Benoit-Piau, a core team of experts and a UvA Masters student on the development of a tool suited for the ATD dance student population, based on feedback by students from different artistic practices, and including a new section targeting mental skills/coping mechanisms that can provide working points to the user and be incorporated in the mentor-student development work (1:1 or with trends relevant for student groups). In 2025, a DMHAT-student prototype will be developed and tested, with feedback gathered through focus groups.  

Although the objective output of this project is the production and validation of a tool that first serves the ATD population and can further develop to serve external organisations; its development supports first and foremost an organisational/educational culture where we identify and provide adequate support and post-signing to struggling/in crisis students, whilst recognizing the natural ebb and flow of mental states and skills and integrating and deploying those traits into education through the mentor/student continuous working relationship.