Tourism and mental health: Two raw diamonds awaiting their brilliance through mutual shaping

Tourism is increasingly recognized as a powerful contributor to mental health, offering both therapeutic benefits and new challenges across diverse contexts. This review synthesizes recent empirical and theoretical developments on the intersection of tourism and psychological wellbeing, highlighting the emerging paradigm that repositions tourism as an informal, adaptive form of mental health intervention. Nature-based, volunteer, religious, and dark tourism each exert distinct psychological influences ranging from stress relief and emotional uplift to identity reconstruction and spiritual resilience. Notably, religious tourism in Iran and East Asia is framed as a vehicle for spiritual healing, yet many studies neglect the sociocultural and psychological complexities underpinning these experiences. Similarly, dark tourism exposes visitors to emotionally charged environments, sometimes producing trauma-like effects that remain under-acknowledged in travel medicine. The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the urgency of integrating mental health considerations into tourism policy, with operator wellbeing and domestic nature tourism becoming focal points of resilience. However, systemic barriers such as stigma, service inaccessibility, and limited critical inquiry persist. This narrative review explores the relationships between two raw diamonds, tourism and mental health, and how they can mutually enhance each other’s potential. This article calls for interdisciplinary frameworks capable of disentangling spiritual, emotional, and behavioral dimensions of tourism to better understand its role in fostering mental wellbeing. Tourism is not merely escapism, it is a latent, underutilized resource for global mental health strategy.