South African healthcare workers are witnessing a powerful shift in the conversation around mental health in their various fields. As the stigma surrounding mental illness starts to break down, initiatives like CrazySocks4Docs is leading the charge to create a culture of openness, support and action.
Spearheaded locally by the Ithemba Foundation, a non-profit entity dedicated to raising awareness of depression as a biological illness and raising funds for research on depression, the CrazySocks4Docs campaign encourages people to wear mismatched or brightly coloured socks to show solidarity with healthcare workers and students in the medicine and health sciences facing mental health challenges and/or living with a mental illness. This initiative, which was launched by Australian cardiologist, Dr Geoff Toogood, serves as a vibrant reminder that it’s okay not to be okay.
Observed annually on the first Friday of June, CrazySocks4Docs (CS4D) day has grown into a national movement. The Ithemba Foundation partners with ten Medicine and Health Sciences faculties across South Africa – including Stellenbosch University’s (SU) Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences (FMHS), as well as healthcare provider, Netcare to encourage students, lecturers, healthcare workers to participate in this uplifting and visible show of support.
Professor Lizette Rabe, founder of the Ithemba Foundation said social media inevitably made her aware of Dr Geoff Toogood’s campaign. “I contacted him and asked his permission to roll it out in South Africa, knowing what the statistics are about the mental stress under which healthcare workers, as well as students in healthcare work.”
A 2024 study analysing 208 community service doctors in South Africa found that 89% and 94% registered high emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation (a mental state where individuals experience feelings of detachment from their own body, thoughts and feelings), respectively. The study found that mental illness, financial difficulties and an unmanageable volume of patients to be some of the primary contributing factors.
Moreover, an article investigating suicide rates among health care professionals globally found that physicians face unique stressors including stigma and barriers to seeking help and access to lethal means. International data reveals that medical students are at higher risk of attempting suicide than the general population. prevalence for suicide ideation (32,2%) while several reported attempts of suicide (6,9%). A 2025 study at a South African university found that many medical students are experience serious mental health challenges, with worrying levels of anxiety and depression.
Dr Anchen Laubscher, medical director of Netcare’s Hospital Division notes that the group continues to support CrazySocks4Docs Day because it’s a vital reminder of the mental health challenges clinicians and other healthcare workers face. “We’re proud to stand behind this movement, having recognised the need to tackle the global rise in healthcare worker burnout head-on”.
Dr Mareike Belbin, a medical doctor and director on the board of the Ithemba Foundation, quoted from a recent study which found that 83% of healthcare workers globally experience stigma when seeking mental health support, making them hesitant to report challenges for fear of being seen as weak or incompetent. “To address this, we advocate for normalising mental health discussions in medical workplaces, expanding access to confidential support services, and fostering a culture that recognizes healthcare professionals also need care and resilience strategies,” says Belbin.
Professor Elmi Muller, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at SU said: “Today, I’m wearing crazy socks. Not because I need a splash of colour, though that’s always welcome, but because I need to remember what it means to feel seen. In medicine, we are trained to appear strong. We become experts in composure. We compartmentalise. We take pride in being the ones others rely on. But beneath the surface, often far beneath it, there is a weight: the burden of decisions that cannot be undone, the cost of exhaustion, the missed birthdays and events, the quiet ache of a life held together by duty. There are parts of ourselves we surrender gradually: not just sleep, but sometimes joy, spontaneity, and even softness. And we do it quietly, often without realising it. Until one day, something breaks, or fades, and we find ourselves wondering what became of the person we used to be.
CrazySocks4Docs is not just about raising awareness for doctors’ mental health. It’s a call to remember that we are human, too.
Muller maintained” “We are allowed to feel tired. To feel doubt. To grieve the things our work has taken from us, even as we celebrate all it gives. Let’s be honest about that tension. Let’s acknowledge the loneliness. Let’s speak not in polished conference tones, but with the raw clarity of people who often stand at the edge of life. Because being a healthcare practitioner should never mean being alone
So today, I wear my crazy socks in honour of all the healthcare workers who’ve ever cried in a hospital bathroom, fallen asleep in scrubs on a couch that wasn’t theirs, or driven home wondering if they did enough.”
Students and healthcare workers across the country will thus don their mismatched socks and post their sock selfie and tag Ithemba Foundation on Facebook (@IthembaFoundation1) and on Instagram (@ithembafoundation) by 13 June 2025. The person with the most likes for each of the ten Medicine and Health Sciences campuses with the most likes by 13 June 2025 will win a cash prize of R2000.
Says Rabe: “We as the public, and Ithemba as a non-profit, have a moral obligation to break the silence and the stigma surrounding those that care for us and to show we #Care4OurCarers – and how better than doing it in a way that will start a conversation, namely wearing a pair of funky, mis-matched socks?
