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Adolescent mental health issues are on the increase, in particular depression, which is now a major public health concern globally. Mental health education is important and young people’s awareness of mental health is potentially limited. This is one factor that creates barriers to seeking support. School nurses and educational professionals recognise that they do not necessarily have the required skill base to support emotional health concerns with young people. The purpose of this paper is to synthesise qualitative evidence related to the nurse’s role in supporting adolescents.

A literature review using a systematic approach was undertaken, predominantly through collection of primary qualitative research studies. In total, 22 published studies are included in this review, extracted from four databases – CINAHL, Embase, Medline and Scopus.

This review shows that awareness of mental health is needed early in adolescence, while at school, to encourage young people to access support and have knowledge of their own emotional health. The need for further mental health education and provision is asserted.

Young people benefit from someone who is accessible and familiar to them in schools so that they can access emotional support as and when needed. Careful involvement of families (including extended families) is noted. It is proposed that this role should be a mental health nurse role, who should be accessible within the school environment.

This paper is original and adds to existing knowledge that mental health challenges are increasing, and more needs to be done in schools to promote mental health and reduce the stigma associated with seeking support.

This discussion paper reviews and critiques literature related to the evolution of the medical humanities as an academic discipline and its contribution to healthcare provision. We argue that despite considerable advances in the field of medical humanities, needs have been identified for a more inclusive, outward‐facing and applied discipline. These needs can be met in the form of what we have called the health humanities, which both embrace interdisciplinarity and engage with the contributions of those marginalised from the medical humanities ‐ for example, allied health professionals, nurses, patients and carers. It is argued that there is a need for new thinking to develop the discipline of health humanities, to develop, provide and share research, expertise, training and education.

Over 100 years ago, Emil Kraepelin revolutionised the classification of psychosis by identifying what he argued were two natural disease entities: manic depressive psychosis (bipolar disorder) and dementia praecox (schizophrenia). Kraepelin's discoveries have since become the “twin pillars” of mainstream psychiatric thinking, practice, and research. Today, however, a growing number of researchers, clinicians, and mental health service users have rejected this model and call for a symptom‐led approach to prioritise subjective experience over diagnostic category. The purpose of this paper is to ask: how can the published first‐person accounts of experts by experience contribute to these debates?

This paper analyses the representation of psychiatric diagnosis in two prominent autobiographies: Kurt Snyder's Me, Myself, and Them: A Firsthand Account of One Young Person's Experience with Schizophrenia (2007) and Elyn Saks' The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (2007).

As well as providing a prognosis and a plan for treatment, the psychiatric diagnosis of schizophrenia gives shape and meaning to the illness experience and ultimately becomes the pivot or platform from which identity and memoir unfold.

The paper introduces two popular autobiographical accounts of schizophrenia which may be useful resources for mental health service users and clinicians.

The paper highlights the complex ways in which people interpret and make meaning from their psychiatric diagnosis.

The paper demonstrates that first‐person accounts make an important, if frequently overlooked, contribution to debates about psychiatric diagnosis.

This paper seeks to analyse a popular novel with regard to the topic of depression.

The paper provides a parallel account of psychological and literary interpretation of a novel depicting a patient suffering from depression.

The paper gives an account of a patient with experience of suffering from depression.

The limitation of this paper lies in its analysis of only one novel with regard to depression.

This novel could be used for people suffering from depression.

This is an account of life/socio‐cultural experience of a patient.

Greater insight into proceedings and the experience of a patient could mean possible usage for psychotherapists.

There is evidence to suggest an association between mood disorders, in particular bipolar disorder, and creativity. This paper aims to examine the evidence that the writer Herman Melville suffered from bipolar disorder.

An interdisciplinary approach is adopted, examining the genetic and biographical evidence as well as textual examples that illustrate the argument in his masterpiece Moby Dick.

Taking the genetic, behavioural, and textual evidence together, it is concluded that the likelihood that Melville did have bipolar disorder is high.

Retrospective analysis of the biographies and work of deceased writers has acknowledged limitations. Close examination of all Melville's literary output would be useful to either add credence to this theory or refute it.

Adding to the evidence that revered writers and artists were on the bipolar disorder spectrum helps people with the condition feel more positive and reduces stigma.

Close literary examination of textual examples of hypomanic writing, combined with a psychological approach to Melville's biography provides evidence that Melville's mental illness contributed positively to his creativity as a writer and is therefore evidence that this condition has some benefits to society.

It is now widely acknowledged that health care professionals on the front line of care delivery will often be among the first to whom patients or clients who have experienced abuse will present or disclose abuse in a clinical context. It is therefore of pivotal importance that all health care professionals, including nurses, are adequately prepared at the earliest opportunity to effectively respond to a disclosure of abuse or identify where abuse may be suspected. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In order to address this contemporary challenge within health care the authors present a model, developed in the UK, for the embedding of safeguarding knowledge, skills and attitudes within undergraduate pre-registration nursing curricula. This model is integrative and focuses on the acquisition of knowledge and skills in the field of safeguarding vulnerable adults and children.

Student evaluation to date has been extremely positive with the majority of student responses indicating that individuals felt that they had received the requisite level of educational support and knowledge to enable them to recognise concerns. However, it was also clear that students felt that the knowledge gained within the classroom setting needed to be effectively supported and translated in the practice setting.

Safeguarding clearly forms a central part of professional accountability and responsibility. It is therefore pivotal that professionals receive the requisite education, skills and knowledge at the earliest opportunity.

To the authors’ knowledge this initiative is novel in approach and as such has the potential to inform similar education programmes.

This paper seeks to examine the value of teaching about mental illness through the use of literature.

Using the examples of two colleges in eastern USA that focus on educating students for healthcare careers, the paper examines two different course formats for using literature to teach about mental illness: a course that places the topic within the larger context of medicine and literature; and a freestanding madness and literature course.

While professional education tends towards specialization, it can lead to a monocultural vision that limits approaches to patients and problems alike. Courses integrating mental illness and literature were found to be effective means of counteracting this trend.

The study is limited to two healthcare‐centred colleges in eastern USA.

For mental health clinicians and healthcare professionals in general, literature broadens the scope of both perspectives and analytical tools for understanding mental disorders and responses to them.

While literature courses often contain such themes as mental illness, courses that truly integrate literature with mental illness meet a growing need for interdisciplinary education as a means of preparing more flexibly thinking healthcare professionals.

Literature and legend features many dangerous female characters. However, in fiction (and in film), it is the male psychopath who dominates. In the scientific literature, research into psychopathy in men also dominates. Studies of the nature and treatment of this severe personality disorder in women are sparse and little is known or agreed about its presentation in this group. Consequently, psychopathy is not routinely assessed in women and the harmful potential of some can be overlooked leading to failures in the management of risk, especially towards partners and children. The purpose of this paper is to explore how psychopathic women manifest the traits of their disorder compared to men.

This paper focuses on the representation of women in fiction who appear to demonstrate psychopathic traits. Several relevant works of fiction will be identified but three texts are described in detail and their female characters and storylines explored.

Gender differences and practice implications are highlighted. Specifically, the paper explores the nuanced ways in which women execute their harmful conduct on others and their most likely relationships with the victims of their aggression; comparisons with men are drawn throughout. Further, comparisons are drawn between the psychopathic female characters created by men and women writers.

The study of psychopathic women in fiction is an invaluable adjunct to empirical research as a way of understanding the phenomenology of psychopathy in this group.

This paper is the first to examine the representation of psychopathic women in fiction and to propose the value of fiction in the study of this particular group of clients.

This paper seeks to describe the advantages and limitations of using the mental illness memoir to teach future health care providers about mental illness.

A review of the challenges to reconstructing the mental illness experience is followed by “caveats and considerations” in employing the mental illness memoir to teach prospective health care providers about mental illness. The importance of examining the way the many factors that shape the mental illness narrative is emphasised.

While mental illness memoirs can be effective vehicles for educating students about mental illness, they may be even more valuable when accompanied by a careful examination of the factors that may have affected the construction of the narrative itself. An ecologically‐based conceptual model is proposed as a framework for systematic analysis of the mental illness memoir. A checklist of factors to employ in the analysis (inventory of influences on the mental illness narrative) is also included.

To use the mental illness memoir effectively as a pedagogical strategy in clinical education, one needs a strategy for organising and interpreting the characteristics of both clients and their contexts.

This model and the accompanying checklist incorporate a broad range of both individual and contextual factors that affect the stories individuals construct about their mental illness. The model can serve as a framework for analysis of an individual memoir and may also suggest specific avenues for further research across multiple accounts or the genre itself.