Summing Up an Excellent Year

As Volume 39 concludes, I would like to highlight some of the special accomplishments of the journal in 2018—including the largest number of manuscript submissions in our history! Because I am writing this editorial before the actual end of the calendar year, to meet production deadlines, I cannot give you the exact number, but we are on pace to exceed 350 submissions! What a contrast with my early days as editor in the late 1990s when submissions seldom exceeded 50! Of course, I am proud of the quality of these manuscripts as well as the quantity.

A hallmark of Issues in Mental Health Nursing is our tradition of producing groundbreaking issues on special topics. After lively discussion and debate among members of the editorial board, we select the topics for each volume at our annual meeting. This year, we featured a special issue on LGBT mental health (January, issue 39-1) for which Edward McCann served as guest editor, and a special psychogerontological issue (May, issue 39-5), for which Lisa Onega served as guest editor. Both were seminal contributions to the psychiatric-mental health nursing literature.

We are delighted to welcome Aine Horgan, senior lecturer at the School of Nursing and Midwifery, University College Cork, Ireland, to our editorial board. Aine has worked in both public and private mental health sectors prior to beginning work in academia in 2004. She is well known for her research on mental health of young people such as university students, including investigations of online peer support and e-health interventions. Readers will recall her recent IMHN article on depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation among Irish undergraduate college students in issue 39-7 of this volume (Horgan, Kelly, Goodwin, & Behan, 2018).

Another highlight of the year was the announcement in our March issue (39-3) of the winners of the Best Research Paper and Best Practice Paper of 2017. The Best Research Paper award went to a team of authors led by Melissa Pinto, who studied low-income African Americans with depressive symptoms (Pinto, Greenblatt, Williams, & Kaplin, 2017). The Best Practice Paper award went to a group of authors led by Lucrezia Mangione who conducted an integrative review of biofield therapies that can be used to address anxiety, mood, and mental wellness (Mangione, Swengros, & Anderson, 2017).

As always, our regular columns (Cultural Competence, Cochrane Column, Psychotherapeutics Column, and Comments, Critique, and Inspiration Column) have been outstanding this year. The editors who contribute these “must-read” columns deserve our gratitude for their faithful submissions of excellent content. Join me in shout-outs to Jackie Flaskerud (Cultural Competence), Marian Roman (Psychotherapeutics), and Michelle Cleary (Comments, Critique, and Inspiration). Alex Mignone ably coordinates the Cochrane Columns, which are written by various volunteers.

Looking ahead, in 2019 the journal will celebrate its 40th anniversary. The inaugural issue of the year focuses on global mental health, featuring articles from South Korea, Thailand, Iran, Turkey, Netherlands, Jordan, Australia, Kenya, Portugal, Canada, and China. This issue was conceived in response to the excellent Routledge Handbook of Global Mental Health Nursing edited by Yearwood and Hines-Martin (2017), in which the editors noted the lack of published research about the conditions in which persons with mental illness exist in many countries. Many of the articles in our upcoming issue shed light on these persons, their lived experiences, and their access to care (or lack thereof), enhancing the knowledge base from which creative mental health interventions and advocacy can emerge.

It is my privilege to serve as your editor as we go into our 40th year. My interactions with all of you (authors, reviewers, and readers) are enormously gratifying. Together, we are making a difference in the lives of persons with mental illness and their families.