Remembering, commemorating and mood matters for 2019

The start of a New Year is accompanied by reflecting on the losses as well as the joys of 2018. In November, towards the end of the year, we witnessed a series of quiet and thoughtful remembrance events around the world, reminding all of the horrors of war and lives lost in the First World War. The First World War involved people from all societies, cultures and religions. Commemorating and remembering are powerful ways of ensuring we do not make the same mistakes again. War, conflict, violence and natural disasters, as outlined in the pages of this journal over the past year,^1–6 are among the main preventable causes and drivers of poor mental health, including complex mental states, poor mood, post-traumatic stress symptoms, anxiety and even psychoses. The emerging evidence indicates that mental health professionals have an important role, not only in specialist mental healthcare for those with the most severe illnesses, but also in public health and national and global government actions, as well as in tackling the political drivers of conflict, inequality and mental distress.

Severe and persistent mood disorders challenge clinicians, and many patients continue to suffer for lengthy periods of time. This month's issue assembles excellent experts reporting on new approaches to tackle treatment-resistant mood disorders (see editorials by Young et al, (pp. 42–51), and by Malhi, pp. 1–3). This themed issue includes topical and controversial issues such as how to assess antidepressant responses, the role of inflammatory markers, ketamine and augmentation strategies, as well as genome-wide association studies and how to define multi-resistant therapy. We will continue to publish papers on these topics throughout the year.

In 2018, we played ‘The Psychiatry Ashes’.^{7, 8} The players from the editorial board of BJPsych competed with a team from the editorial board of the Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry (ANZJP). I'd like to thank all the players for their valiant contributions and sense of fun in participating. BJPsych scored 1015 runs and ANZJP scored 1864 runs. Replicating publishing and research impact in a sport is not easy. We managed to recreate measures of performance and random events (like the second innings in which some battling papers were removed). The two excellent teams comprised highly committed scientists; therefore, there was no need to consider how to take account of nefarious acts of ball tampering, barracking or rivalries rather than scholarly friendship. Although this was a clear defeat, the Editor of our sister journal explores how impact by citations is one, perhaps flawed, way of assessing performance and considers different measures of value and impact in the December editorial of ANZJP.⁹ Citation metrics are for some institutions linked to reputation and financial income, an approach to academic practice that may not help us to achieve the mission of developing more effective therapies. Indeed, an overreliance on performance metrics is known to drive less chivalrous behaviours, such as duplicate publications, fraud, more conflicts of interest, and poor practice in reporting research content fully and in an unbiased manner.^10–13

We are now one year into our new partnership with Cambridge University Press. We are extending our reach and global impact by refreshing our editorial boards and improving the service to authors and readers around the world. I welcome feedback from our readers on the content and style of the journal. We offer much guidance in our instructions to authors and provide regular workshops on peer review, editorial work and publishing for early career researchers and for those who wish to improve the quality of their publications. We propose to extend this work to address reporting frameworks and research integrity. Readers and authors interested in these seminars and workshops should contact the editorial office. Future editorials and issues will provide guidance and explore how we are improving scientific practices.