We invite chapter abstract submissions for an edited academic volume exploring how people cope—and how clinicians, researchers, educators, and media-makers can support coping—when the potential fall of democracy feels like a lived psychological threat and everyday life becomes saturated with uncertainty, mistrust, and danger-signals. This is a mental-health and human resilience volume (coping, regulation, meaning-making, post-traumatic growth), not a political science text or partisan argument.

What the book is about

This volume centers on a simple claim: when democracy feels fragile and trust collapses—trust in institutions, in community, in shared reality, and sometimes in one’s own future—hope does not simply “return.” Hope has to be built, and building hope begins with the capacity to imagine a world worth moving toward.

Fiction—film, television, games, and immersive storyworlds—can operate like an architect’s sketch: a safe-yet-serious design space where we practice agency, moral choice, relational repair, and future-oriented identity before we risk those capacities in real life. Suspending disbelief is not naïve; it can be the first step in rebuilding inner trust when the outside world keeps delivering threat cues.

Stories have long explored how societies fracture and rebuild; Star Wars is one widely recognized popular example of democracy’s collapse into authoritarianism and the later work of resistance and rebuilding, but the same arc appears across art, literature, and cinema. In film/video-based therapy, we treat these narrative worlds not as “escapism,” but as deliberate hope-practice—structured imaginative work that supports nervous system regulation, meaning-making, and post-traumatic growth when the culture around us feels destabilized.

Accordingly, this call invites creatives, clinicians, researchers, educators, and people directly affected to propose chapters that generate and study new hope-making narratives through therapeutic filmmaking and client-created audio-visual work, alongside interactive media creation (video games, VR/XR) and AI-mediated storytelling tools. We welcome work that is empirical, practice-based, or theoretical, and that shows how making and engaging with audio-visual stories can support resilience and post-traumatic growth for individuals and communities living with chronic instability.