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The World Health Organisation found depression to be the fourth leading cause of disability in Malawi (Bowie, 2006) with the prevalence of mental health need in children and young people in Malawi estimated between 10 and 30% (Kutcher et al., 2019). One option to address this was to provide schoolteachers with skills and knowledge related to mental health so they can better support children. There is generally a lack of evidence of the utility or feasibility of school-based mental health literacy programmes in low to medium income countries (LMIC). This paper aims to report on a project to train schoolteachers in Malawi on aspects of mental health.

The aim of this project was to determine the acceptability and feasibility of delivering a training initiative in Malawi to teachers to better enable them to recognise and cope with school children who had been exposed to trauma and substance misuse.

Feedback was generated through the use of a specifically designed pre and post measure, focus groups, interviews and observations of the teaching delivery.

Teachers found the training built on their existing knowledge and they requested further opportunities for training and consultation about how to manage difficult presentations. It was evident that teachers did not know how to access mental health care or support for children whose needs could not be met by schoolteachers alone.

For a sustainable improvement for children’s mental health care in this context, further training becomes valuable when located as part of a network of joined up health and educational services.

People with long‐term, severe mental health problems are at higher risk of premature death linked to lifestyle. They are more likely to smoke, to be overweight, and to take little or no exercise. Their physical health needs also tend notoriously to be neglected by the health services. Diane Crone and colleagues conducted a comparative survey of the health behaviours and lifestyles of mental health service users in one city in the south west, and found much cause for concern.

People with long‐term mental health problems have a considerably higher risk of physical illness and premature mortality than the general population. This paper describes a survey of lifestyle behaviours and health perceptions of people with severe mental illness (SMI) living in Gloucester. Findings were compared with data from the general population of Gloucestershire to reveal significant health differences that are currently being addressed through a multi‐agency health alliance established to initiate targeted health promoting opportunities for people with severe mental illness in the community.

This paper maps utopian theories of technological change. The focus is on debates surrounding emerging industrial technologies which contribute to making the relationship between humans and machines more symbiotic and entangled, such as robotics, automation and artificial intelligence. The aim is to provide a map to navigate complex debates on the potential for technology to be used for emancipatory purposes and to plot the grounds for tactical engagements.

The paper proposes a two-way axis to map theories into to a six-category typology. Axis one contains the parameters humanist–assemblage. Humanists draw on the idea of a human essence of creative labour-power, and treat machines as alienated and exploitative form of this essence. Assemblage theorists draw on posthumanism and poststructuralism, maintaining that humans always exist within assemblages which also contain non-human forces. Axis two contains the parameters utopian/optimist; tactical/processual; and dystopian/pessimist, depending on the construed potential for using new technologies for empowering ends.

The growing social role of robots portends unknown, and maybe radical, changes, but there is no single human perspective from which this shift is conceived. Approaches cluster in six distinct sets, each with different paradigmatic assumptions.

Mapping the categories is useful pedagogically, and makes other political interventions possible, for example interventions between groups and social movements whose practice-based ontologies differ vastly.

Bringing different approaches into contact and mapping differences in ways which make them more comparable, can help to identify the points of disagreement and the empirical or axiomatic grounds for these. It might facilitate the future identification of criteria to choose among the approaches.

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of the Journal of Management Development is split into six sections covering abstracts under the following headings: General; Executive Development; Management Education; Management Skills Training; Management Development Techniques; Career Management and Succession Planning.

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of the Journal of European Industrial Training is split into seven sections covering abstracts under the following headings: General Training Issues; Education & Students; Training/Learning Techniques; Training Technology; Skills Training; Management Development; Career/HR Development.