What does it take to sustain mental health in journalism today? At the 2025 Mental Health in Journalism Summit (#MHJS25), over 50 sessions and 170 speakers from across the globe explored this urgent question.
From trauma and burnout to leadership, innovation, and community care, a common thread emerged: the future of journalism depends on the wellbeing of journalists.
Held over three days, from October 8th to 10th, 2025, the Summit commemorated World Mental Health Day by bringing together hundreds of journalists, editors, HR professionals, founders, CEOs, and mental health experts. For the second consecutive year, the event marked a key milestone for The Self-Investigation and the media industry as a whole. This would not have been possible without the fundamental support of our co-funder, the Fred Foundation, and the 36 organizations that joined as outreach partners or sponsors.
The conversations revealed major patterns: global research is still scarce, but country-level data and regional or local initiatives are multiplying. People and organizations want to help, yet most don’t know how or where to start. The result? Dozens of promising pilots and interventions but fragmented, unstructured knowledge.
As several speakers agreed, it’s not just the content that harms; toxic newsroom cultures and precarious work conditions remain one of the biggest mental health risks.
This year, the Summit was framed under the theme “Resilience for uncertain times.” The program, which featured over 50 sessions in both English and Spanish, was co-created with an open call for session proposals.
Below are five key topics that shaped MHJS25 and the future of a healthier, more humane media industry.
1. Strengthening the Ecosystem: Why a Global Forum is Needed
Of the 800 participants registered for the Summit, we had representation from all around the world, from Mexico to India, and from Germany to Nigeria, and the program featured experts from 47 countries. The fact that the Summit is fully online allows for real inclusivity and facilitates exchanges that would otherwise not be possible.
We heard firsthand experiences and wellbeing initiatives from colleagues in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Romania, Jordan, Brazil, France, Venezuela, and many other countries. No other forum in our industry offers this kind of global exchange, even though breaking regional bubbles and learning from proven mental health strategies in newsrooms—often very similar to ours—around the world is essential. After all, many of these challenges are shared across borders.
This year, the Summit featured fewer sessions than in 2024. However, we offered a more curated and unique program. Our team doubled down on efforts to combine multiple community-submitted proposals; as a result, we had richer discussions and fostered new connections among professionals and projects. We believe this effort is essential to really move the needle and aligns with our executive director’s Nieman Lab predictions from the last couple of years: to have a healthier industry, we need to have deeper conversations, create structured peer support initiatives, and a globally connected movement.
2. Leadership & Newsroom Culture: Building Systems of Care
Good intentions are no longer enough. Newsroom leaders are realizing that “care” has to be designed, measured, and sustained at an organisational level, not left to individual effort.
As Elaine Díaz (Tiny News Collective), speaker of the panel The role of HR in supporting mentally healthy practices in difficult times, puts in this post: “you can’t “self-care” your way out of burnout. It requires strong systems, firm boundaries and tons of grace.”
Speakers from the Financial Times echoed this sentiment in their session Championing Wellbeing Across a Global Newsroom, showing how wellbeing initiatives can move from reactive to strategic when backed by leadership and data.
Across these discussions, one insight stood out: human resources teams and funders must be part of the solution, not spectators to it. Their policies, budgets, and priorities can either reinforce burnout or build resilience into the system. When HR practices and funding frameworks integrate wellbeing from the start —not as a response to crisis or a nice one-off— they help redefine what responsible journalism looks like from the inside out.
That’s why in 2024 we launched the Compromiso por la salud mental en el periodismo. This initiative encourages organizations to cultivate a journalism culture that actively prioritizes mental health by investing in necessary resources, and recognizing that this focus on well-being is essential for maintaining journalistic excellence and integrity. Today, more than 100 individuals and 35 organizations have signed it.
4. Resilience & Trauma: Healing in the Line of Duty
From Gaza to Latin America, journalists shared stories of exhaustion, fear, and hope. In Covering Gaza: Psychological Costs and Paths to Resilience, reporters spoke of living through trauma while reporting on it, a dual reality that has reshaped the profession’s understanding of resilience.
The session Corporate support and collective care inside Ukrainian newsrooms, shared important insights on how Ukrainian journalists work and process trauma after almost 4 year of war: “Since 2022, mental health has shifted from being a personal issue to one of professional ethics — and survival for the entire media community”, Valeriia Muskharina (National Union of Journalists of Ukraine):
Freelancers –who make up a growing share of the global media workforce– also described the constant tension between flexibility and insecurity. In The Stress for Survival: Being a Freelance Journalist, participants shared how the absence of contracts, support systems, and benefits magnifies the mental toll of the work. Their stories underscored that resilience shouldn’t be an individual performance but a collective responsibility — one that must include independent journalists, too.
Resilience wasn’t romanticized; it was reframed as collective strength, boundaries, and support systems. These conversations reinforced that models of psychological safety can be replicated across contexts, proving that newsroom care isn’t a luxury; it’s key infrastructure.
3. Inclusion & Care: Gender, Equity, and Community Support
The Summit’s gender-focused panels unpacked invisible burdens that too often fall on women and marginalized journalists.
Sessions like Workplaces That Care: Childcare and Safe Spaces for Women Journalists y What About Men? broadened the conversation on wellbeing by showing that care in journalism cannot be understood solely through gendered expectations. Speakers highlighted the structural barriers faced by women — particularly mothers — and emphasized the need for childcare, physical safety, and flexible policies. What About Men? added an essential dimension, examining how male journalists often lack spaces to express vulnerability, seek emotional support, or challenge harmful “provider” narratives that shape newsroom behaviour.
Across these discussions, a shared insight emerged: journalists need more than individual coping strategies. Participants described how peer groups, solidarity circles, and cross-newsroom networks are becoming essential to exchanging knowledge, normalizing vulnerability, and treating empathy as a learned professional skill rather than a personal trait.
As speaker Parul Somani (Silver Linings) reflects below, the key themes that emerged from her workshop on resilience were: the importance of community, the power of experience-sharing and the benefit of seizing control:
We also talked about neurodiversity in the newsroom, and reinforced that every brain processes pressure differently, and that inclusive design — from work rhythms to communication styles — is just as important as any new tool. Further discussions on editing and empathy showed how feedback culture, tone, and collaboration can protect mental health as much as they shape good journalism.
5. Regional Perspectives & Grassroots Resilience: Lessons from the Global South
Speakers from Latin America, Africa, and Asia grounded the Summit in lived experience. In Conversar para sanar, Rocío Franco (Sociedad Peruana de Psicoanálisis / PUCP) reflected on their experience doing group discussions for photojournalists in Peru: “The group discussion allowed for questioning the idea of the photojournalist as an indestructible hero, to recognize themselves as vulnerable and assume the need for self-care.”
From Salud mental en acción esta African Experiences of Resilience and wellbeing, participants shared country-led initiatives: peer networks, collective healing spaces, and trauma-informed training. Below is a key moment of the Summit, the opening keynote in English From Personal Struggles to Collective Strength: A Conversation on Courage and Change, which featured speakers from India, South Africa and Hong Kong.
Journalists from Myanmar and Thailand described the dual challenge of reporting from exile while raising families, and how community-led childcare and solidarity networks became lifelines in unsafe environments.
Despite limited funding and research, these stories carried optimism. They demonstrated that solutions can be replicated across borders, and that local innovations often carry global lessons.
Across every theme, MHJS25 revealed a profession in transition: from endurance to care, from silence to structure. There’s still no single blueprint, but the energy is here: journalism is beginning to heal itself.
To sustain that shift, the field needs structured knowledge, communities of practice, and the courage to treat wellbeing as both a right and a responsibility.
Most sessions at the Mental Health in the Journalism Summit 2025 were recorded.
Register here to access all the videos and watch the open keynotes on YouTube.
