Our Collective Mental Health Challenge

Hi everyone,

Today’s newsletter has two purposes:

1) To update you on some new opportunities for people to sign up for psychiatree groups.

2) My first post on the intersection between mental health and the climate crisis (Our Collective Mental Health Challenge).

1) New Opportunities:

Wednesday evenings at Queen’s Park

Beginning in July, I will be holding a group Wednesdays from 6:30-8:15pm outdoors at Queen’s Park. To sign up, you can click here and go to the Queen’s Park location.

Wednesday afternoons at Toronto Metropolitan University

Beginning in September, I will be holding a group Wednesdays from 1:00-2:45pm outdoors at Toronto Metropolitan University. To sign up, you can click here and go to the TMU location.

Please note that if there are no available slots to sign up in either group, reply to this email and we will set up additional options.

I am in discussions with several other places, with more opportunities coming soon!

2) Our Collective Mental Health Challenge

Over the last 6 months I have been transitioning from a community hospital-based general outpatient psychiatric practice. People have frequently asked me what I am transitioning to and I have struggled to clearly describe the problem I am working to address. After several months of reflection, I can now articulate it with clarity.

The World Health Organization’s definition of mental health is lengthy and nuanced. Let’s examine this part (italicized emphasis mine):

“[Mental health] underpins our individual and collective abilities to make decisions, build relationships and shape the world we live in... it is crucial to personal, community and socio-economic development.”¹

In my psychiatric training and work there was no attention paid to our collective ability to shape the world we live in. Psychiatry assesses individual mental health based on checklists and scales of symptoms. If the symptoms on the scales get better and the person functions within our society, then the person is deemed to be mentally well.

And yet some questions keep coming up for me - if we don’t feel distress that our society is engaging in collective suicide, are we mentally healthy? If we feel distressed but are not taking effective action, is that mentally healthy? To me, mental health does not equate to feeling content within a dysfunctional society.

The science is clear that our political and corporate leaders are not making sufficient progress to avert disaster.² If our collective decision-making processes do not make decisions for the benefit of the collective and our socio-economic development values economic growth over sustaining life, then as a society we are collectively mentally unwell.

We have all the technical solutions that are needed to address the climate crisis and yet we collectively lack the willingness to implement them. So to me the climate crisis is not a technological crisis - it is a crisis of mental health. As a mental health professional with skills in cultivating motivation and facilitating groups, I’m working to shift from the individualistic approach to psychiatry to focusing on our collective ability to shape the world we live in.

To receive future psychiatree posts on healing our mental health and the climate crisis together, please subscribe to: https://psychiatree.beehiiv.com/subscribe

I’d love to hear your reactions to this post. Please email me at [email protected].

Thanks for the care that you give,

Nate

References:

1) https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-health-strengthening-our-response

2) Thunberg, Greta. The Climate Book. 2023. New York: Penguin Press.