Reflective seminars for the promotion of mental health in medical education: a qualitative model in a Latin American context

Background Medical training sustains a persistent tension between academic demands, emotional well-being, and professional identity. In Latin America, mental health promotion remains scarcely integrated into the formal curriculum. This study examined a reflective seminar consisting of a single standardised four-hour session delivered once to each of 54 groups of second-year students (20 students per group; 1,080 students in total) during the preclinical phase of medical training. The study explored participants’ perceptions of the seminar’s pedagogical dynamics and its perceived effects. Methods Qualitative interpretive research was conducted using a hermeneutic-phenomenological design. Four focus groups were held with 26 research participants (14 students and 12 teachers) who had taken part in the seminar and provided written informed consent. Inductive-deductive thematic analysis combined open and axial coding, source triangulation, and collegial calibration to support interpretive rigour. Results Three interrelated dimensions were identified. Perceived institutional care legitimised well-being as an academic concern. Psychological safety favoured openness, peer support, and reflective deliberation. Teachers acted as emotional facilitators and models of professional vulnerability, which participants associated with a reconfiguration of pedagogical relationships and of the hidden curriculum. Neither psychological safety nor perceived benefit was uniform: some students remained disengaged, participation was lower in one group with a more reserved facilitator, and one teacher described feeling overwhelmed when students later sought individual support. Conclusion The reflective seminar may function as a relational pedagogical infrastructure that articulates well-being and professional identity. Participants described curricular integration, a climate of trust, and teacher modelling as enabling ecological readings of distress and as displacing individualising narratives. These findings provide qualitative evidence of plausible, perceived mechanisms by which formative interventions can humanise medical education, and they generate hypotheses for comparable contexts rather than demonstrated effects.