The morning opened with a presentation of the L'Athanor short-stay programme – the adolescent psychiatric care unit at CNP Saint-Martin, from which Forest4Youth originally emerged. Hearing the clinical context first anchored the day in practice rather than theory: the specific logic of short-stay treatment, and the gradual discovery that forest-based sessions – conducted in private woodlands with mediation support from SRFB – were achieving something that ward-based care alone could not. This was the origin of the project, and it was the right place to begin.

The screening of La Sagesse de nos Arbres, presented in the presence of its director Thierry Dory of Belgian Waffles Film Factory, was one of the morning's most distinctive and carefully considered moments. A film about trees, time, and the particular quality of attention that forests can generate, it accomplished something that no clinical presentation or research summary can fully replicate: it shifted the register of the day entirely, drawing the audience into a different kind of engagement — slower, more attentive, less mediated by professional frameworks.

That Forest4Youth chose to place a film at the heart of a professional event is itself a statement. Changing how people feel about and relate to forests – not only what they know about them – is understood by the project as part of its own mission. The presence of an artist at the table throughout the day was not incidental. It was structural.

Following the screening, the day moved into its centrepiece: a cross-disciplinary roundtable — Regards Croisés: Forêt et Santé Mentale — moderated by Olivier Fabes of the Royal Forestry Society of Belgium (SRFB). The panel brought together six voices representing distinctly different fields and institutional vantage points: Dr. François-Xavier Polis, head of L'Athanor at CNP Saint-Martin; Philippe de Wouters, Director of SRFB; Prof. Malgorzata Klass and Prof. Emilie Lacroix of ULB; Violette Van Keymeulen of UCL; and Thierry Dory, who moved from filmmaker to panellist without missing a beat.

What the audience witnessed across that discussion was precisely the kind of exchange that Forest4Youth exists to make possible — and that rarely happens without deliberate structure to hold it. Psychiatry, forestry, research, clinical psychology, and the arts do not naturally share a common language. The roundtable did not pretend otherwise. The tensions were productive; the convergences, meaningful; and the questions that remained open at the end were, in many ways, the most valuable part of what was generated.

Participants were divided into four heterogeneous groups — mixing clinicians, researchers, foresters, students, and public authority representatives — for a two-hour guided session in Le Bois Brûlé, the woodland directly adjoining CNP Saint-Martin. The walk served to demonstrate the hospital's immediate proximity to forest environments, though L'Athanor's actual therapeutic immersions take place in private forests with mediation support from SRFB. The deliberate mixing of profiles extended the morning's regards croisés dynamic into direct shared experience.

The other group joined a workshop led by Prof. Małgorzata Klass. Participants — clinicians, researchers, foresters, and public authority representatives — were invited to experience the immersive VR environment, reflect on its clinical potential, and co-create practical implementation pathways: clinical applications, sensory elements to enhance immersion, precautions, institutional integration, and the format of the forthcoming practical guide.

Running both activities in parallel — and allowing participants to choose — reflected something important about where this field stands. Real and virtual forest immersion are not competing answers to the same question. They are different instruments, with different affordances, different populations, and different roles within an integrated therapeutic approach.

© Marie Paulus