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There is urgent need to explore medical students’ understandings of mental illness to better support this high-risk group. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate mental health literacy in medical students using the Mental Health Literacy Scale (MHLS), and provide validation of the measure.

In total, 251 participants were recruited from medical schools across the UK. Participants completed demographic details and the MHLS. This paper reports total MHLS scores and their relationships with demographics and experiences with mental illness.

The mean MHLS score was 127.69. MHL was significantly higher in females, and students in later years of study (p<0.05). Over 40 per cent of respondents reported having personal experience of mental illness. This, as well as having a close friend or family member with a mental illness, was associated with higher MHL (p<0.05).

This study is the first to use the MHLS and provide validation of this measure in medical students. Despite high rates of personal experience with mental health issues, medical students’ average MHLS scores were comparable to studies of non-medical student groups. Medical schools should aim to build students’ confidence in recognising and seeking help for mental health issues from the first year of medical training. MHL is a multi-faceted issue; further work is required to improve awareness of risk factors, to better understand why males demonstrate poorer MHL scores than females, and to work towards improving MHL in males.

This chapter aims to explore how emotional language construing experiences of UK COVID-19 lockdown in the present frames expectations for future behaviours and intended memories. We analyse 102 responses collected through an online narrative survey during the first lockdown in the United Kingdom. The survey asked participants to articulate ‘an image to remember lockdown by’. Taking a positive discourse analysis approach, using corpus linguistics and systemic functional linguistics tools, we challenge the primarily negative mainstream discourses of COVID-19 and lockdown experiences and explore how language choices evaluating different aspects of life in lockdown evoke emotion to construe a desired projected future. Findings indicate that respondents actively and selectively articulate primarily positive intended memories based on kinship peace and nature that contrast with normal life experiences. Such choices are framed within emotional states enacted through language choices. We argue that these projected memories act as a ‘time capsule’ whereby decisions to retain positive memories help to promote adaptive well-being in the face of potentially overwhelmingly negative circumstances.

A celebration of possible transformations of our radical and mainstream discourses of globalization. Begins by displacing two conventional dualizations that inform our scholarly theorizing and practice: between the global and the local and between our work and ourselves. Advocating politics of abundance and generosity that celebrates ontological exuberance and the creation of transformative realities, invites academic élites to co‐create global possibilities in the service of all life and all ways of life. Enjoying the multiple possibilities of texts three narrative evocations follow – the sacred, the erotic and the ecological. The postcolonial gifts of these three dimensions inform possible transformations for us as teachers, enquirers and practitioners. It concludes with invitations to action and offerings of service.