Psychological Safety, Professional Identity, and Ecological Approaches to Mental Health in Medical Education

Mental health in the context of medical education has become a pressing concern, with extensive evidence highlighting high rates of depression, anxiety, burnout, and suicidal ideation among students and trainees. While these issues have been well-documented, critical questions remain regarding the conditions and mechanisms within educational environments that exacerbate or mitigate these challenges. Recent scholarship recognizes that mental health cannot be fully understood through individual vulnerability alone, but is deeply intertwined with institutional practices, relational dynamics, and broader ecological factors. The emerging consensus calls for research that goes beyond prevalence studies and explores the roles of cultural, systemic, and contextual variables that shape mental health in medical learners around the globe. However, there remains a significant gap when it comes to theoretically informed, context-sensitive, and institutionally integrated interventions that address these multi-layered determinants, particularly within underrepresented regions and resource-constrained contexts.This Research Topic aims to reframe the conversation by focusing on mental health as a relational, institutional, and ecological phenomenon within medical and health professions education. The primary goal is to bring together interdisciplinary research and innovative perspectives that can illuminate how psychological safety, professional identity formation, curriculum structures, and institutional cultures interact to influence well-being. Key objectives include identifying effective preventive and curriculum-integrated interventions, examining the influence of faculty and hidden curricula, exploring systemic and global perspectives—especially from the Global South—and advancing transferable models that foster sustainable change beyond deficit-based frameworks. Contributors are encouraged to challenge dominant paradigms, explore relational ethics, and investigate the complex relationships between structural context and student experience.The boundaries of this Research Topic extend to all levels and phases of medical and health professions education, with particular attention to the interplay between individual experience and institutional systems. Submissions should aim to go beyond individual-level analyses, employing diverse methodologies to interrogate both explanatory and transformative dimensions of trainee mental health. To gather further insights in these areas, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:- Psychological safety and trust in health professions education- Professional Identity Formation (PIF) and its impact on learner well-being- Influence of hidden curriculum and institutional culture on mental health- Faculty role modeling, vulnerability, and the relational aspects of mentorship- Ecological, systems-based, and intersectional approaches to mental health interventions- Gender, structural stressors, and the academic environment- Innovative, curriculum-integrated mental health interventions and their scalability- Narrative, reflective, and relational pedagogies as approaches to well-being- Comparative, cross-cultural, and Global South perspectives on institutional transformationWe welcome empirical studies, theoretical analyses, mixed-methods research, intervention studies, and reflective or narrative submissions, in alignment with the outlined themes. Topic editors: Diana Patricia Guizar-Sánchez, Raúl Sampieri-Cabrera, Omar Matuk-Villazon Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/78936/psychological-safety-professional-identity-and-ecological-approaches-to-mental-health-in-medical-education