For the past two years, the editors of this special section have worked in close collaboration to consider the various ways in which human rights and rights-based approaches can promote public health and mental health policies and practices in the prevention of mass atrocity crimes. In June 2019, we convened academics and practitioners engaged in work at the intersections of these disciplines across various contexts and at various intervention points along the continuum of harms that can be defined as atrocity crimes. Represented among these scholars and practitioners were psychologists, sociologists, social psychologists, epidemiologists, public health practitioners, political scientists, legal scholars, human rights practitioners, anthropologists, historians, peace studies scholars, and philosophers. All participants recognized that multidisciplinary tools and frames were critical to their work in their respective disciplines to identify effective strategies to disrupt causal pathways of identity-based violence, human rights abuses, and mass atrocity crimes. One result of this work is this special section, where the authors of the collected papers dive deeply into the public health and mental health rights dilemmas that emerge from prevention efforts related to identity-based violence and mass atrocity crimes—including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.1 The authors examine the ways in which we can adapt rights and health frameworks, methods, research, tools, and practice toward a more sophisticated and truly interdisciplinary understanding and application of atrocity prevention. In their totality, the papers demonstrate the state of these current fields and the intersecting themes within human rights, public health, mental health, and mass atrocity prevention and, importantly, future potential directions for next collaborative steps. The protection and fulfillment of mental health rights is critically important within the larger principle of the right to health, yet it receives disparate attention within the biomedical model. As the editorial for HHRJ’s special section on mental health and human rights in 2020 stated, “there is no health without mental health, but there is no mental health without human rights.”2 Discrimination, disempowerment, and social

Despite evidence that exercise is beneficial for serious mental illness, it continues to be an under utilized adjunct treatment strategy. Thus, the aims of this study were to examine if self-selected or volunteer exercise programs are feasible in a structured outpatient program and who might choose to participate in such a program. Individuals with serious mental illness admitted to a partial hospital program were offered an adjunct exercise group or a control, psychoeducation group. The exercise group (N = 38) met three times a week for 50 min. Individuals who chose not to exercise (N = 28), attended a psychoeducational control group. Those who self-selected the exercise group tended to have a higher level of education, employment rate and to be Caucasian. The control group had more medical problems, a higher body mass index and alcohol intake. The groups did not differ on age, sex, or use of cigarettes and caffeine. The exercise group was regularly attended. Both groups improved equally on all outcomes symptom and psychological well-being outcomes. These data highlight that certain individuals with serious mental illness may be more likely to exercise based on demographic opposed to clinical features, or illness characteristics. Thus, adjunct exercise programs for individuals with serious mental illness seem to be feasible, but certain groups of individuals (i.e., ethnic minorities, unemployed) should be targeted for recruitment as they are less likely to volunteer for such adjunct exercise programs.