Beyond Borders: Global Mental Health Conference

Much has been said and written on the COVID-19 pandemic and its various impacts on our physical and mental health. The objectives of this paper are to analyse certain issues and concerns through a personal memoir, i.e., my experience of teaching and supervising the post-graduate students of Social Work, through digital platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic at my workplace, Bankura University. Nevertheless, whether the digital world is enhancing prosperity, social connectedness, peace, and the collectivisation of humans, or leading to alienation, violence, and unhappiness, is a matter of academic research and debate, and has led to the formation of discourses surrounding the positive and negative impacts of such technologies.
 
 The ‘new normal’ days of COVID brought dual psychosocial challenges, primarily stemming from seclusion and alienation from the pandemic's emerging realities, and partially from overdependence on digital technologies, leading to a hyperreal world. If the psychosocial and survival issues of seclusion and alienation emerging from the COVID-realities needed to be tackled, then the use of digital technologies became indispensable. Thus, the challenge was to strike a balance between the real and the hyperreal worlds to minimise the cons and maximise the pros while interacting with students via digital platforms and dealing with community wellness as discussed in this paper. The objective of the paper is also to discuss the changing pattern of pedagogy that might have been influenced by ‘new normal’ psychosocial exposures during the pandemic era.
The methodological approach of this paper is primarily grounded in my experiences of teaching and supervising postgraduate students through digital platforms as a social work educator. In addition, methods like content analyses of primary sources-students’ reports, online routines, notices, and materials have been adopted, along with conceptual analyses of the secondary literature reviewed. 
Keywords: Digital pedagogy, COVID-19 pandemic, New normal, Psychosocial, Reality, Hyperreality.
Much has been said and written on the COVID-19 pandemic and its various impacts on our physical and mental health. The objectives of this paper are to analyse certain issues and concerns through a personal memoir, i.e., my experience of teaching and supervising the post-graduate students of Social Work, through digital platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic at my workplace, Bankura University. Nevertheless, whether the digital world is enhancing prosperity, social connectedness, peace, and the collectivisation of humans, or leading to alienation, violence, and unhappiness, is a matter of academic research and debate, and has led to the formation of discourses surrounding the positive and negative impacts of such technologies.
 
 The ‘new normal’ days of COVID brought dual psychosocial challenges, primarily stemming from seclusion and alienation from the pandemic's emerging realities, and partially from overdependence on digital technologies, leading to a hyperreal world. If the psychosocial and survival issues of seclusion and alienation emerging from the COVID-realities needed to be tackled, then the use of digital technologies became indispensable. Thus, the challenge was to strike a balance between the real and the hyperreal worlds to minimise the cons and maximise the pros while interacting with students via digital platforms and dealing with community wellness as discussed in this paper. The objective of the paper is also to discuss the changing pattern of pedagogy that might have been influenced by ‘new normal’ psychosocial exposures during the pandemic era.
The methodological approach of this paper is primarily grounded in my experiences of teaching and supervising postgraduate students through digital platforms as a social work educator. In addition, methods like content analyses of primary sources-students’ reports, online routines, notices, and materials have been adopted, along with conceptual analyses of the secondary literature reviewed. 
Keywords: Digital pedagogy, COVID-19 pandemic, New normal, Psychosocial, Reality, Hyperreality.

Suicidal tendencies among university students have become an alarming public health and social issue in Bangladesh, posing serious challenges to students' mental well-being, academic success, and social relationships. The transition to university life often exposes students to various psychosocial stressors, including academic pressure, financial constraints, family expectations, relationship problems, and feelings of isolation, which may increase their vulnerability to suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Against this backdrop, the present study aims to explore the psychosocial challenges associated with suicidal tendencies among university students in Bangladesh and to examine the coping mechanisms adopted by students to manage psychological distress.
This study employed a qualitative research approach, using in-depth interviews with university students who had experienced suicidal thoughts or had been exposed to severe psychological distress. The findings reveal that a complex interaction of interpersonal and intrapersonal factors contributes to suicidal tendencies among students. Family conflicts, romantic relationship breakdowns, academic stress, uncertainty about future careers, financial hardship, loneliness, and inadequate social support emerged as major contributing factors. These challenges often resulted in emotional instability, declining academic performance, reduced self-esteem, and social withdrawal.
Despite these adversities, many students demonstrated resilience by adopting diverse coping strategies, including seeking support from friends and family, accessing professional counseling services, engaging in extracurricular and volunteer activities, practicing religious and spiritual activities, and participating in creative and recreational pursuits. The study highlights the urgent need for comprehensive mental health initiatives within universities, including accessible counseling services, awareness programs, peer support systems, and institutional mechanisms to identify and support at-risk students. By bringing students' experiences beyond the silence, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of student mental health and provides valuable insights for developing effective interventions to prevent suicidal tendencies among university students in Bangladesh.

There is a growing mental health crisis on U.S. college campuses. Because of stigma, costs, and limited college counseling services, this study seeks to understand how self-care can promote a college student’s mental health. This mixed-methods survey took place at a public university in the Southwestern region of the U.S. Correlational and regression analyses found that self-care was a predictor of overall mental health well-being. The findings also suggest that students believe that their culture does not support self-care. The following themes emerged: physical wellness and maintenance, emotional and mental wellness, mindfulness and spirituality, connection and relational support, creativity, expression, and enjoyment, and barriers to self-care. The researchers encourage promoting self-care and educating students about these types of practices.

Generational trauma, and intergenerational (or ancestral trauma), refers to the emotional, psychological, and even physical wounds passed down through families and communities. These traumas often stem from unresolved pain, systemic oppression, and deeply rooted cycles of adversity. While it may seem invisible, its impact is far-reaching, manifesting in behaviors, relationships, health issues, and the overall well-being of individuals and entire communities.


This insightful discussion will explore the essence of generational trauma, how it is stored in the body, and how it shapes the way we live, think, feel, and connect. We will examine its deep ties to societal inequities and its significant influence on family structures and marginalized communities, highlighting why addressing it is essential for collective healing and progress.


Participants will gain an understanding of how generational trauma affects all of us, even if we are unaware of its presence. We'll uncover the science behind how trauma is passed down and the transformative power of healing it. Practical tools and strategies for breaking these cycles—such as mindfulness, somatic practices, and community-based approaches—will be shared to inspire action and empowerment.
By acknowledging the weight of the past and committing to the healing process, we can unlock immense benefits, including improved mental and physical health, stronger relationships, and a brighter, more resilient future for ourselves and future generations.


Join us for this impactful conversation as we explore the path toward breaking free from inherited burdens and building communities rooted in understanding, connection, and healing.

In St Kitts and Nevis, a person experiencing a mental health crisis can still be legally described as a lunatic. They can be ordered into confinement by a magistrate, without legal representation, without the right to be present at the hearing, and without any guarantee of treatment. The law that permits this is the Lunacy and Mental Treatment Act 1956 — a colonial statute that has never been replaced, amended in any meaningful way, or aligned with the constitutional rights that independence promised.

This impact story traces what that gap looks like in practice. A young man with schizophrenia kills his grandmother during a psychotic episode. The judge at sentencing acknowledges that imprisonment is the wrong response — that what is needed is psychiatric care in a secure facility with structured review. He sentences the man to twenty-one years anyway, because no other legal option exists. This is not a failure of individual compassion. It is the predictable output of a legal system built for a different era, operating on a different understanding of what a person with mental illness is: not a patient, not a rights-bearer, but a subject for confinement.

Drawing on two years of legal research into the mental health framework of St Kitts and Nevis, this presentation argues that colonial mental health law is itself a form of structural inequity — one that compounds scarcity of services with scarcity of rights. It explores what resilience means when the law works against you, and what a rights-based, therapeutically grounded framework could look like for a small island state with limited resources but profound constitutional obligations.

Presentation Abstract
Mental healthcare access for LGBTIQ+ individuals in Zimbabwe is shaped by structural inequities, social stigma, and heteronormative healthcare systems that often undermine psychological safety and wellbeing. While global mental health research has increasingly recognised the impact of minority stress on mental health outcomes, there is limited evidence from African contexts that centres the lived experiences and resilience of LGBTIQ+ communities.
This presentation draws on a qualitative phenomenological study exploring the experiences of twelve LGBTIQ+ individuals who accessed therapy and mental healthcare services in Harare, Zimbabwe. Guided by the Minority Stress Model and the Affirmative Therapy Approach, the study employed semi-structured interviews and arts-based draw-write-tell methods to capture participants' narratives of vulnerability, identity, and resilience.
The findings reveal that many participants encountered therapy environments characterised by judgement, identity invalidation, fear of disclosure, and discrimination, leading many to conceal their identities or avoid formal mental healthcare services altogether. At the same time, participants demonstrated remarkable resilience through peer support networks, community solidarity, online safe spaces, and creative forms of self-expression that fostered healing and belonging.
Positioned within the conference theme of Using Creative Approaches to Building Resiliency, this presentation highlights how community-based and affirming practices can mitigate the effects of structural inequities and promote mental wellbeing among marginalised populations. It argues for culturally responsive, affirming, and psychologically safe mental healthcare systems that recognise sexual and gender diversity while strengthening resilience in restrictive social contexts. The presentation offers practical implications for mental health practitioners, researchers, educators, and policymakers working to advance inclusive and equitable mental healthcare in the Global South.

Resilience is often described as an individual trait, suggesting that people simply “bounce back” from adversity through strength or determination. Yet survivors of trauma know that healing is rarely linear and that resilience is often built through relationships, opportunities, and communities that foster safety and connection. This presentation explores resilience through the unique perspective of a survivor-clinician, integrating lived experience with nearly two decades of professional work in mental health, substance use treatment, and trauma-informed care.
Drawing from experiences of human trafficking, domestic violence, homelessness, and recovery, alongside years of supporting survivors across community mental health and domestic violence settings, this presentation examines how trauma shapes identity and how healing emerges over time. Through storytelling and clinical reflection, participants will be invited to reconsider common assumptions about resilience, treatment resistance, and recovery.
Rather than viewing resilience as an extraordinary quality possessed by a few individuals, this presentation highlights the roles of community, meaningful relationships, education, culture, and access to resources in sustaining wellbeing. It also explores how systems and professionals can unintentionally reinforce stigma or, alternatively, create conditions that support healing and hope.
By weaving together personal experience and practice-based knowledge, this presentation seeks to amplify voices that are often absent from mental health conversations and to encourage a broader understanding of resilience as something cultivated collectively rather than achieved alone. Participants will leave with a deeper appreciation of how connection, compassion, and community can transform survival into healing.

AI can play a supplementary role in mental health care rather than a replacement. Waitlists, last-minute cancellations, insurance barriers, and geographic shortages make conventional care structurally unavailable to much of the population it claims to serve. Yet current AIs hold assumptions about vulnerable users that actively misrepresent them.
This presentation identifies three distinct misreadings revealed in AI Chatbots, drawing on interdisciplinary evidence across human-computer interaction, clinical psychology, critical theory, and platform studies. First, AI outputs perform helpfulness and safety rather than faithfully tracking users' actual states, resulting in sycophancy, gaslighting, and over-sensitive crisis detection. AIs restructures the therapeutic space itself: users cannot know which disclosure will trigger a refusal or escalation, and so begin self-censoring by performing wellness rather than expressing distress. This dynamic is compounded by the growing solicitation of AI note-taking systems in clinical settings, where the presence of a monitoring apparatus changes the room before it acts. Second, AI tools are designed as products but experienced as relationships. Paywalls and abrupt model changes function not as consumer inconveniences but as structural instability and relational loss for the most dependent users. Memory failures further misrepresent users' narratives through premature theme-locking, stereotype overwriting, and detail fixation, treating people as types to be categorized, rather than complex entities evolving and unfolding over time. Third, the current therapeutic frameworks are predominantly built on a Western, individualist, and CBT-derived basis, which both AI and human therapists are prone to. Yet unlike human clinicians constrained by their training, AI holds genuine capacity for cross-cultural adaptability, which will support culture-specific care.
For AI and mental health wellbeing, it is not technical failures awaiting better engineering that matter most. It is the wrong assumptions about what vulnerable people need. Resilience cannot be built on a foundation that systematically misrepresents the person it claims to support.

The United States is facing a serious youth mental health crisis. Approximately 18% of adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 experience depressive episodes each year, and nearly 40% of those receive no mental health care (McBain et al., 2025). Into this gap, generative AI chatbots have become informal mental health resources. A 2025 nationally representative survey of 1,058 youth aged 12 to 21 found that one in eight adolescents use AI tools such as ChatGPT for mental health counsel, without professional support (McBain et al., 2025).
Despite the scale of this phenomenon, its risks remain critically understudied. Ng (2025) found that generative AI promotes emotional attachments in vulnerable youth and risks reinforcing pathology. Sharma et al. (2025) revealed that AI research in adolescent mental health has focused heavily on diagnostic tools, leaving unstructured chatbot interactions under-investigated. Feng et al. (2025) examined AI chatbot effectiveness in structured clinical interventions but did not address the self-directed, unsupervised way most teens engage with these tools. Scholarship on AI-generated health misinformation has similarly concentrated on COVID-19 and vaccination, leaving mental health almost entirely unexamined (Suarez-Lledo & Alvarez-Galvez, 2021).
I present a conceptual framework examining adolescent self-diagnosis of depression via AI chatbots and the misinformation risks embedded in that process. I ask three questions: whether AI-generated responses to depressive symptom disclosures are clinically accurate, whether teens act on those responses in ways that delay formal help-seeking, and whether vulnerable subgroups, including LGBTQ+ youth, rural adolescents, and those from non-English-speaking populations, face disproportionate misinformation exposure (Grenon et al., 2025). I call for interdisciplinary collaboration across clinical psychology, digital health, and communication science to evaluate AI depression guidance, develop adolescent-specific AI literacy interventions, and establish policy standards before resiliency efforts are undermined by the very technologies young people are already turning to for help.

Learners with albinism and mild intellectual developmental disorder (MIDD) in Soweto township demonstrate resilience as they navigate complex and intersecting challenges within their educational and social environments. Moving beyond visibility, this study foregrounds how these learners respond to barriers associated with visual impairments, visible physical differences, and cognitive and adaptive limitations, highlighting their capacity for strength, adaptability, and persistence. This phenomenological study explored resilience among learners with albinism and MIDD in Soweto township trough the Ubuntu lens. Six participants were purposively selected from a Learners with Special Educational Needs (LSEN) school. Data were generated through individual interviews and the draw-and-narrate technique, allowing participants to express their lived experiences through both verbal and visual forms. Thematic analysis revealed that resilience is enacted through personal agency, adaptive coping strategies, and, importantly, through relational support systems embedded in school and community contexts. Framed within an ubuntu perspective, the findings position resilience as a relational and contextually grounded process rather than an individual trait. The study highlights the role of inclusive practices, supportive relationships, and contextually responsive interventions in strengthening learners’ sense of belonging and capacity to thrive. By aligning with an ubuntu framework, the study emphasises that resilience is co-constructed through interconnectedness, care, and shared humanity, offering important implications for inclusive education in contexts such as Soweto township.

How does the human mind maintain resilience and exercise autonomy when entirely stripped of physical freedom? This presentation explores the extraordinary lived experience of surviving a violent kidnapping, utilizing creative psychological framing to negotiate release, and navigating the long-term, non-linear realities of post-traumatic stress.


Far from a passive narrative of endurance, this session focuses on the innovative cognitive strategies required to build and sustain resilience during and after an acute life crisis. In speaking I will deconstruct how to discover "creative agency" within a powerless environment, leveraging adaptive communication, tactical empathy, and psychological framing as active tools to de-escalate captors and secure freedom.


Moving beyond the incident itself, the presentation examines the lifelong journey of trauma recovery. In speaking, I will share how conventional clinical interventions were augmented by practice-based, creative resilience strategies—such as narrative reclamation and somatic grounding—to manage severe PTSD and transition from a state of perpetual hypervigilance to one of genuine thriving. By blending profound personal narrative with psychological insight, this session offers mental health practitioners, researchers, and advocates a rare, first-hand perspective on the mechanics of survival, the reality of living with trauma across the lifespan, and actionable frameworks for fostering post-traumatic growth.

Psychosis spectrum experiences (PSE), including hearing voices, are too often understood only through a deficit-based, symptom-focused lens — one that centers medication, underemphasizes relational approaches, and leaves little room for the perspectives of people who live with these experiences. This session presents a co-developed, peer-and-clinician framework for serving voice-hearers, their families, and the professionals who support them, grounded in a strengths-based reframing of psychosis as part of the natural diversity of human experience.
Drawing on the presenters' collaborative active-learning toolkit, Reframing Psychosis Spectrum Experiences, the session introduces relational strategies as well as practical tools for approaching voice content, including command voices.  
Key insights include: relationships with voices are dynamic and can shift through boundary-setting and other concrete strategies, not just suppression; most commanding voices are non-violent, and the relationship between command content and behavior is shaped by belief, relationship, and perceived consequence rather than the command itself; and integrating peer expertise alongside clinical training produces more compassionate, more accurate, and more resilient systems of support.
This session models the conference's commitment to lived experience as expertise by centering a peer specialist as co-author and co-presenter throughout, offering attendees a practical, replicable template for collaborative knowledge-building between communities and systems of care — and concrete tools they can use immediately in clinical, peer, or family-support settings.