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There has been growing awareness underpinned with legislative recognition of the need to reduce the stigma attached to mental health. Education is seen as an integral factor for this endeavour. The purpose of this paper is to review existing literature to determine both positive and negative attitudinal changes of health-care-related undergraduate students towards mental illness after a training intervention within higher education.

A search of papers written in the English Language was conducted between 2004 and 2021, using CINAHL, Eric, Educational Research Complete, Medline, psychINFO and SocIndex. Search terms used were undergraduate, attitudes or perceptions, mental illness/mental ill health, education, stigma and students.

In total, 24 studies were critically reviewed, which included experimental, descriptive and exploratory designs. The appraisal of papers used recognised evaluation tools to review the methodological quality. Findings suggest that overall, anti-stigma education has a significant positive effect for student attitudinal change.

Mental health anti-stigma education is beneficial for changing attitudes, however, more bio-medically framed training is less powerful for initiating change. Learning from those with the lived experience appears to have a more sustainable impact as indicated in some of the studies. There is a need for more exploratory research to gain further knowledge on the critical educational mechanisms that may foster more long-term reframing of positive attitudes towards mental health.

Training providers need to consider the compelling evidence base surrounding anti-stigma pedagogy that supports the use of individuals with experience of mental ill health within the educational processes.

Mental health stigma has potential for profound negative impact on individuals and at a wider societal level. Education is central to enable learners to consider their attitudes to mental illness to reduce stigmatising attitudes. Students on health-care-related courses are influential in becoming catalysts for change.

This paper has critically reviewed the literature examining the attitudes of health-care-related undergraduate students following anti-stigma education, offering insights into some of positive and negative attitudinal changes and opinions of the event. In particular contributing to an understanding on the important components for eradicating the stigma surrounding mental health.

This paper is one in a series of quarterly reflections on recent research in mental health and social inclusion.

Two papers are summarised here, representing two sides of a coin: one reviewing research on tackling stigma against people with experience of mental distress; the other illustrating how people with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder (or 'manic‐depression'), can manage to continue in work and other valued social roles.

The first paper suggests that some approaches to tackling stigma work better than others, and people researching them need to use measures that accurately capture change. Community‐based participatory research allows researchers and people with experience of mental distress to collaborate and capture outcomes that will really make a difference to people's lives. The second paper illustrates how people with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder can not only continue to work but also participate in other socially valued roles.However, it was important to have support for developing self‐understanding and for discovering which strategies were most helpful personally for managing stressors. To conclude: people with severe mental health conditions can and do continue to live well in society, but this requires, in addition to personal coping strategies, continued attention to reducing stigma and discrimination and to understanding what works in achieving this.

This paper summarises a recent review paper on research into effective ways of tackling stigma against people experiencing mental distress, and a recent paper illustrating how people can live well in the community with bipolar disorder.

The need to improve the mental health of construction personnel has increased owing to high rates of mental health problems. Hence, a proper evaluation of a mix of implementable intervention strategies in the workplace will assist in achieving good mental health. Although there are recommendations in occupational health literature on strategies that can be adopted, it is unknown how they fit appropriately into the construction industry. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify the mix of strategies for the construction industry and their criticality.

Drawing from the context of developing countries with Nigeria as a case study, data was collected using the quantitative technique. A questionnaire survey consisting of 31 intervention strategies was administered to a purposive sample of 45 experts in the Nigerian construction industry. The data collected was analyzed using mean score analysis and fuzzy synthetic evaluation.

The study revealed that strategies focused on boosting employee morale and engagement and interpersonal relationship offer higher chances of improving mental health among construction personnel. The study showed that implementing job crafting and sculpting may benefit the industry. The analysis showed that the overall criticality of the intervention strategies to the Nigerian construction workplace is high, suggesting that if implemented, the mental health of construction personnel can be improved.

The study provides an initial understanding of the most critical multi-level intervention strategies to enhance good mental health among construction personnel in Nigeria and the global construction industry. These findings serve as a guide to policymakers and advocate the implementation of strategies to adopt for a psychologically healthy construction workplace in developing countries.