Burnout is a common issue among healthcare professionals and can have a negative impact on both personal and professional well-being. This initiative follows a group of doctors working in Buckinghamshire, UK, who are at moderate to high risk of burnout, over 6 months to determine whether participation in a movie club, as a form of stress relief and social support, can have a positive impact on well-being. The aim of the project was to investigate the impact on doctors’ well-being by improving connectedness, reducing the feeling of isolation and encouraging face-to-face activities.

We are members of Students’ Education, Empowerment and Development in Mental Health, a group of medical students and psychiatrists from around the globe under the Psychiatry, Medicine and Primary Care Section of the World Psychiatric Association. In this article, we put forward recommendations to help improve the mental health response in disaster-prone regions such as Türkiye. We recommend a three-step multi-tiered mental health response system that could significantly help to address the immediate, short-term and long-term mental health needs of communities directly affected by a disaster. The recommendation draws from the relevant literature and, most importantly, from our lived experiences of living in earthquake-prone countries.

Approximately 20% of the adult Indian population are affected by a psychiatric disorder that requires intervention from a mental health professional (Math & Srinivasaraju, 2010). In spite of this, the provision of mental healthcare is poor. Therefore, to learn more, between July and August 2014 I undertook a 4-week elective at the Psychiatry Department of Sawai Man Singh (SMS) Hospital in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India. The Psychiatry Department was founded in 1952. It has a total of 332 beds, with nearly 20 000 patients admitted per year and an attendance of nearly 100 000 annually at the out-patient department.

The article offers a personal memoir of a psychiatric registrar's impressions of daily life while working in a South African mental hospital during the apartheid era in the late 1960s. From the perspective of a trainee psychiatrist, he recalls admission procedures, ward management, patient assessment, and medical and nursing care, including electroconvulsive therapy administration, at that time.

Decades of systemic oppression in Syria, from the 1963 state of emergency to the 2011–2024 conflict, have caused widespread psychological devastation. Arbitrary imprisonment, torture and sexual violence have been systematically weaponised. Following the fall of the Syrian regime in December 2024, freed political prisoners face severe mental health challenges due to years of inhumane conditions and trauma. This paper emphasises the urgent need for specialised mental health interventions and outlines evidence-based pathways to healing. A coordinated, multi-tiered response, integrating local and international efforts, is essential to prioritise mental health aid, restore dignity and support survivors in rebuilding their futures.