Editorial

Welcome to the penultimate issue of 2022, which commences with a theoretical paper entitled ‘Mentalizing the modern world’ by Chloe Campbell and Elizabeth Allison. Mentalization-based treatment (MBT) is a key part of the new integrated offer for people with severe mental health problems, as set out in the NHS Long Term Plan. However, this paper takes a somewhat different perspective, turning attention away from MBT and instead applying the concepts of mentalizing and epistemic trust to the relationship between social systems and individual subjective experiences. This focus draws our attention to societal contributors to mental health difficulties. The authors suggest that we may be able to identify the mechanism for the observable relationship between psychopathology and socio-economic alienation and inequality in the disadvantaged individual’s experience of a broader social context that fails to take into account the subjective richness of the individual minds of those with diminished economic value or social capital, as is the case in highly unequal social systems such as the UK. They propose that the experience of being mentalized and openness to epistemic trust may be the mechanism by which individual experiences of psychic distress, perception of self-agency and perceptions of others, are both influenced by and shape wider social phenomena and social change. They go on to consider some implications for legitimacy and the social contract when reduced co-mentalizing brings about an ‘epistemic mismatch’ in relation to social communication. They conclude that the impact of social inequalities and the breakdown of political legitimacy on mentalizing, epistemic trust and psychopathology means that optimal individual outcomes cannot always be achieved without adaptation of the wider social environment. This draws our attention to the possibility for improvements in the mental health of the population by reducing inequalities within our society.

The next paper, by Andr