The Asido Foundation has announced an extension to the submission deadline for its 3rd International Mental Health Conference, offering a renewed opportunity for creators across disciplines, including comic artists, to contribute their work to one of Africa’s most influential platforms for mental health discourse. The new deadline is 15 December 2025, giving artists, researchers, and project leaders more time to prepare.

While the conference is traditionally grounded in research, clinical practice, and community mental health interventions, Asido Foundation has deliberately expanded its scope to include visual art, explicitly listing comics, drawings, and photography as eligible submissions. It is a rare but increasingly necessary invitation for creatives to engage with issues often treated as the preserve of academia and the medical sciences.

With the theme “Future of Mental Health in Nigeria: Innovation, Community, Inclusion & Collaboration,” the 2026 edition recognises that the future of mental health communication depends not only on scientific data but also on compelling storytelling, the kind the African comic book space has been cultivating with precision, empathy, and emotional intelligence.

For comic artists, this is more than an opportunity to submit work. It is an opening to demonstrate how sequential art can translate complex issues, from trauma and stigma to youth mental health and the pressures of urban life, into narratives that resonate far beyond policy documents and lecture halls. Comics, with their unique blend of imagery, symbolism, cultural nuance, and accessible language, have the power to cut through apathy and fear, two of the quietest killers in the mental health landscape.

Asido Foundation’s subthemes make this terrain even richer for creatives. Topics such as adolescent and youth mental health, technology and AI in mental health, community mental health for marginalised groups, and social determinants of mental health align naturally with the lived realities African comic artists often explore. Those working in speculative fiction, Afro-futurism, social realism, satire, and slice-of-life storytelling all have a place in this conversation.

The inclusion of comics in the visual art category also reflects a broader, global shift. Institutions are beginning to understand that culture, art, and media are indispensable tools in reshaping public attitudes towards mental health. In Africa, where misconceptions remain deeply entrenched, a single well-crafted comic strip can open doors that academic papers cannot.

For an industry like ours, often pigeonholed as “entertainment”, this call for abstracts is a powerful reminder that creativity is not peripheral to societal progress. It is central. It is necessary. And it is time we embrace these cross-sector collaborations that amplify the relevance of African comic art in spaces that inform policy, influence public perception, and inspire change.

Comic artists, storytellers, illustrators, and visual narrators now have a platform to challenge stigma, provoke empathy, and shape the national conversation on mental health, all through the medium they understand best. For those willing to lend their creativity to an issue that affects millions, this is the moment to step forward.

Submissions can be made via bit.ly/AIMHAbstracts