What Every Psychiatrist Should Know About the Climate Crisis
The APA Committee on Climate Change and Mental Health is identifying the key components of curricula on climate-related issues. The following list describes the broad scope of mental health concerns related to climate change, organized by the following:
The neuropsychiatric consequences of exposure to various climate vectors, such as heat, air pollution, and neurotoxicant exposure.
The array of anxiety and mood symptoms/conditions that arise from acute disasters and long-term exposure due to repeated climate harms.
The indirect effects of the ever-increasing sense of foreboding, fear, anxiety, and hopelessness that derive from growing climate awareness within the general population, with special emphasis on the impacts on children and youth.
This list should be considered and included in any climate and mental health–related curriculum program for professional trainees at the graduate medical education and continuing medical education levels, for example, psychiatry residents and practicing psychiatrists. The content may need to be simplified for undergraduate medical curriculum inclusion. More details in “Climate and Health Curriculum Development: Mental Health Impacts and Responses.”
Heat
The impact of high temperatures on violence, suicide, and depression.
The relationship between neurotransmitters and heat regulation and how psychotropic medications increase heat stroke risk.
Safety measures during heat waves.
Policy measures that can be enacted to promote resilience to mounting temperatures.
Air pollution
The psychiatric impacts of ozone and particulate air pollution on children’s developmental cognitive health, on dementia, and on depression and suicide.
The relationship between clean air policies and improved population health.
Habitat change and neurobiology
Climate impacts on infectious disease vectors, waterborne disease, and the nutritional value/availability of food.
Connection of nutritional changes to common mental disorders.
How waterborne toxins result from changes or diversions of water supply.
Habitat change and psychological effects
Climate impacts on loss of culture and livelihood due to geophysical changes and forced migration.
The psychic demands and emotional impacts of habitat change.
The role of mental health professionals in facilitating the emotional process of adaptation and focusing on the psychological processes that support social cohesion.
Existential and general psychology
How climate change affects people emotionally.
How to address existential distress, resistance to change, cognitive biases, denialism, and the overwhelming complexity of climate solutions.
Eco-anxiety
Description of eco-anxiety and psychiatric models for understanding it, emphasizing that eco-anxiety is often nonpathological and different from clinical anxiety disorders.
Ecological grief
The impacts on indigenous communities, women’s reproductive decisions, farmers/ranchers, and others whose lives depend upon the land.
Our larger collective grief and sense of human failure.
The work of planetary mourning and how our love of what we lose can stimulate positive action.
Behavioral change for climate change
Change theory and the neurobiology of habits.
Habits of thought that deter climate responsiveness at individual and societal levels.
Re-imagining, telling new stories, being creative, being authentic, and showing moral courage to facilitate sustained change in the face of the climate crisis.
Communicating about climate change
Effective strategies for educating/motivating health professionals.
The best approaches for clinical encounters, public presentations, and policy discussions.
Group approaches to climate distress
Community groups for processing climate distress.
Methods for living sustainably through conscious community.
Community approaches to climate resilience
What communities can and should do to prepare for the health and mental health impacts of climate change.
Engagement with environmental justice and just transition initiatives.
Transformational resilience–derived public health interventions at the community level to promote psychosocial resilience and social cohesion.
Climate disasters
The psychological impacts of acute and repeated weather and climate disasters.
Understanding how “we are all in or between disasters” to support sustained humanitarian and emotional disaster responses. ■
David Pollack, M.D., is professor emeritus for public policy in the Department of Psychiatry and Division of Management at Oregon Health and Science University. He is also a member of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance.
Elizabeth Haase, M.D., is medical director of behavioral health at the Carson Tahoe Regional Medical Center and chair of APA’s Committee on Climate Change and Mental Health.
