This year, the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival has over 300 events taking place in 13 regions across Scotland from 10-29 October. In the build-up to the festival, we will be offering a series of regional highlights, helping you keep track of what’s happening near you. Here is our pick of events taking place in Glasgow.

The CCA will be transformed into a hub of film activity from 12–15 October, as we will be screening award winners and special selections from our International Film Competition, alongside workshops and discussions. The International Film Awards (Thu 12 Oct) celebrates high achievement in filmmaking that addresses mental health, as we welcome directors and others involved in the creative process to receive their awards and share their stories about how the films came to be.

An entire day of programming has been devoted to exploring Men’s Mental Health (Sat 14 Oct), culminating in a special screening of Becoming Cary Grant, including a Q&A with director Mark Kidel, and we have an exceptional programme of features, including Catalan drama Summer 1993 (Fri 13 Oct), which won Best First Feature at the Berlin International Film Festival and was recently selected by Spain as its Oscar nomination; Donkeyote (Sun 15 Oct), which received a BAFTA nomination for Feature Film; and The Other Half (Sun 15 Oct), starring Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black) and Tom Cullen (Weekend).

Julia Taudevin’s darkly comic political cabaret Hysteria! has his premiere at Òran Mór (9–14 Oct) before travelling to the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. Written in dialogue with over 100 people, the show was partly developed through a research project with the Mental Health Foundation, exploring the impact of sexism on mental health. Mark Lockyer’s hilarious, touching and critically acclaimed solo show Living With The Lights On is also showing at the Citizens Theatre (20–21 Oct), as well as the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh, which sees Mark shares the true story of how his life fell apart following an on-stage meltdown during a 1995 RSC production of Romeo & Juliet.

Part of our commitment to fostering new work exploring mental health, 5 Ways to Begin (Sat 14 Oct) presents works in progress from five artists across multiple performance disciplines, giving audiences an insight into emerging talent. To Love Somebody Melancholy (Sun 15 Oct), from folktronic singer-songwriter Minute Taker and animation artist Ana Stefaniak, follows an artist as he journeys through the euphoric highs and the self-destructive lows of his creative cycles, and we also present One Mississippi, a new and hard-hitting verbatim play exploring how childhood experiences shape men’s adult lives, at the Tron Theatre (13–14 Oct).

Platform’s annual celebration and contribution to the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival, Headspace (Fri 13 Oct), features a unique blend of quality theatre, music and visual arts delivered by contemporary artists and participants from the local community. The programme at Platform also features Paul Michael Henry’s Shrimp Dance (Sun 22 Oct), a new performance dealing with mental health, consumer capitalism, and ecological crisis, and Brewband (Thu 19 Oct), an inclusive music and dance performance, featuring Scottish indie rock musicians and talented dancers.

And there are also a number of special events, new and longstanding. Creative Therapies’ inaugural mini-festival Marbles: Lost and Found (9–28 Oct) is bursting with funny and moving animations, an inspirational exhibition, panel discussions, and a professional development training programme for artists, therapists and support workers, while Moving Minds (Thu 19 Oct) is a day of celebration with events exploring diversity and mental wellbeing around the theme of Reclaim. Finally, join us to honour the very best submissions from SMHAF’s annual writing competition at our annual Writing Awards (Thu 26 Oct), held in partnership with Bipolar Scotland.

We hope you can make it to some of these events in Glasgow, and encourage you to explore the full programme to discover everything that is taking place.