The national roundtable on mental health legislation focussed on reviewing the status of mental health legislations and identify practical pathways for implementation. The discussion highlighted key gaps between legislative intent and on-ground realities, including weak enforcement, limitations in rights-based appraoch, limited institutional mechanisms, resource constraints, and insufficient capacity for implementation and monitoring.

A national round table on Mental Health Legislative reforms was held on 25th March 2026 in Islamabad. The objective was to engage key federal and provincial stakeholders and initiate a process of reviewing the existing mental health legislations, reflect on the challenges for implementation, and develop a consensus on next actionable steps for making these laws meaningful in practice.

Newsletter 42 presents supervision data from 107 child and adolescent cases (under 18 years) reported from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. It highlights that most cases are girls in late adolescence, with depression and stress conditions being the most common diagnoses, driven largely by family and education-related stressors.