A Year of PLOS Mental Health
PLOS Mental Health’s First Year
2024 is flying by and November 1st marks the one year anniversary since PLOS Mental Health launched. In that time, we have been blown away by the support for our journal but also the recognition of the authenticity of our mission. Mental health and well-being apply to everyone, from any walk of life. In 2024, we cannot ignore the heartbreaking events that have shattered the well-being of far too many. Now more than ever, we need to listen and learn and not be afraid to challenge the inequalities that have seen so many suffer. PLOS Mental Health, led by Editors-in-Chief Professor Rochelle Burgess and Charlene Sunkel along with Executive Editor Dr Karli Montague-Cardoso, will continue to stay true to its mission of improving mental health and well-being globally.
It’s a proud moment to celebrate the one-year anniversary of PLOS Mental Health! It’s been an incredible journey, witnessing the progress toward becoming a trusted open-access journal. The diversity of submissions, authorship, and global reach signals exciting potential for continued growth and impact.
Charlene Sunkel, Co-EiC PLOS Mental Health
When we started our journey with PLOS Mental Health, we hoped to create a space where diversity of knowledge, people and perspectives came together to advance our field. A year later it’s been exciting to see that hope become a reality – with representations from all continents on our editorial team, in the work we publish, and the authors who publish it. We’ve created spaces for dialogue, and opportunities for ECR’s to push boundaries in various domains with their new ideas. We’ve held the voices of lived experience at the heart of what we do with platforms for academic contributions and personal reflections. After just one year, we’ve shown things can be different in a mental health journal and mental health sciences. I can’t wait to see what’s next!
Professor Rochelle Burgess, Co-EiC PLOS Mental Health
Our Mission is Only as Authentic as Our Editorial Board
Our journal is what it is because of our incredible and dedicated editorial board. We can never overlook the fact that each and every one of our Academic and Section Editors are volunteering to help steer the journal in their limited free time. This should not ever be taken for granted and we thank all of you. At present, we have 171 Academic Editors from 48 different countries in all regions of the world.
Each of our 16 journal sections are led by our Section Editors. All of our Section Editors not only have a wealth of experience, but deeply care about the communities that their work serves. Indeed, many of them have their own powerful lived experiences that they bring to this role and everything that they do. In 2024, we welcomed two new Section Editors – Luke Beardon, who co-leads our Neurodiversity section along with Amanda Kirby, and AZA Allsop – who will co-lead our ‘Underlying Mechanisms’ section alongside Michael Breakspear. We are excited to see how their voices, alongside our other amazing Section Editors, shape the journal in 2025.
Our Commitment to Our Authors
- Helping our authors to reach their communities
The fact is however, even with our amazing editors, our journal would simply not exist without our authors. Choosing a journal to publish your work in is always a careful decision and we are so grateful that our authors are not only supporting us as a new journal, but trusting that we are a suitable home for their important and sensitive work.
It is important to us that when authors trust us to handle and promote their work appropriately and effectively, that we do in fact deliver on this. We are so proud when our authors’ work reaches a wide audience. Some of the content that we have been publishing has indeed had an incredible impact. In our first batch of papers back in June of this year, we learned more about how internet addiction in adolescents, which directly impacts their well-being, is accompanied by connectivity changes in the brain. At the time of writing this blog, this paper has been the subject of over 100 news stories for 93 different news outlets and has been discussed by nearly 700 ‘X’ accounts. Our first batch of papers also included a call from Section Editor Sidarta Ribeiro to manage mental health more holistically – moving away from the automatic overreliance on medication. This Opinion piece has had a remarkable but well-deserved reach of over a billion.
- Not shying away from difficult discussions
Our mission however is not just about ensuring that our authors’ work has a big impact. At PLOS Mental Health, we don’t want to shy away from difficult topics. An inclusive society that can challenge and change requires a safety that allows all issues to be discussed and all perspectives to be respected. Within the mental health field, there are many sensitive topics – and within our first year as a journal, we have provided a platform for many of them including, but not limited to, euthanasia, workplace-related suicidality, psychosis risk and migration, stigma in the LGBTQ+ community, and the effects of receiving a diagnostic label. All of these topics will be sensitive, potentially triggering and perspectives may vary considerably between different communities and individuals. But unless we normalize conversations surrounding these topics, we will struggle to advance mental health care in the ways that are desperately needed.
As part of our mission to be inclusive of, and sensitive to, all communities, we have launched a series of initiatives this year that enable us to further elevate lived experience voices, dig deeper into community needs and promote work from ECRs and those in historically underrepresented regions.
- Journeys in Mental Health
A central aim of PLOS Mental Health is to provide a platform for lived experience voices. Although society is becoming more supportive and discussions are more open, we know that many would still be more comfortable sharing their experiences anonymously due to different types of stigma. Whilst we want to help empower those with lived experiences, we also understand that true freedom is having a choice about how your story is shared. This blog series consists of accounts from anonymous contributors sharing their journeys and thoughts. Since March of this year, our contributors have discussed masking, authenticity and diagnostic labels. We have also had special editions for World Refugee Day, World Schizophrenia Day, World Suicide Prevention Day and World Mental Health Day.
- Community Case Studies
In June, we introduced ‘Community Case Studies’. This blog series aims to hear from our authors in more depth about their circumstances, communities or projects to better understand the community-specific barriers and needs. So far, as part of this series, we have learned more about the vital importance of lay counselling in the community, the devastating mental health consequences of child marriage, the impact of online communities on the mental health of young people, considerations when working towards the prevention of femicide, and the need for improved psychosocial interventions in the context of neglected tropical diseases. We will continue to shine a spotlight on our communities and authors through this series as we move into 2025.
- Getting to know PLOS Mental Health
As mentioned above, each of our Section Editors brings their unique perspectives to ensure that as a journal, we leave no communities behind. To date, we have heard more from Gloria Wong about her priorities for our ‘Community Mental Health’ Section, Vania Martinez about her visions for ‘Epidemiology of Mental Health’ and Charles Ogunbode about the opportunities that our ‘Environmental Impacts’ Section brings. For World Suicide Prevention Day, we also learned more about our Lived Experience & Advocacy Section Editor Sandersan Onie. Finally, this year, when we welcomed Luke Beardon to our Neurodiversity Section, we heard more about how he would like this section to take shape as the journal matures.
Many journals tend to emphasize performance metrics, but this one stands out for its mission-driven approach
Gloria Wong, Community Mental Health
- The Bigger Picture Series and Special Seminars
A lot of our focus as the journal launched was on the representation of lived experiences from all communities. And indeed, our focus will continue to be this. But we also want to be able to champion our authors. Without their work, we have no journal. With this in mind, we launched a quarterly seminar series ‘The Bigger Picture’. The series will feature our authors as guest panelists and will highlight work that the journal has published, which has been led by ECRs, authors from historically underrepresented regions, or is focused on underrepresented communities. Along with our first installment on lay counseling, we have recently focused on help-seeking in older survivors of crime. In addition to our seminar series, sometimes, our content has such a powerful message that the best way to expand the discussion is to just talk. Therefore, this year, PLOS Mental Health hosted a special seminar with Rupi Legha based on her Opinion piece on mental health crisis management in the US – specifically her perspectives of the risks involved. We will continue to highlight our content in this way next year.
Introducing Our Lived Experience Focus Group for 2025
We are really excited to see the journal develop further in 2025 and will continue with our mission and current initiatives. However, in addition, we are delighted to announce that we will be launching a lived experience focus group. We will be providing more details and opening applications for the group in the very near future.
The first year of PLOS Mental Health has been a remarkable experience for all involved and we are so excited to continue this journey. We hope that all of our Editors, Reviewers, Authors and Readers continue to support and shape us so that we can do our part in improving mental health globally. As we move into our second year, we will continue to learn and adapt to ensure that our mission stays effective and authentic.
Interested in submitting your work to us? Click here to see more about the content that we publish
Would you like to join the Editorial Board of PLOS Mental Health? Click here to apply!
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