The Climate Committee is an active group responsive to the demands of the climate crisis.

Climate Committee

ABOUT OUR COMMITTEE

The purpose of the GAP Climate Committee is to creatively address the need for shifts within all facets of psychiatry- clinical, administrative, advocacy, research, and education, in order to meet the urgent need for mitigation of and adaptation to climate change.

The Committee’s work is guided by the following understandings and principles:

  • Climate change is a hyperobject (Morton, 2013), however we have responsibilities to influence it and its effects.

  • We have a responsibility to act now, in our current time, to anticipated levels of disruption and toxic stress.

  • Unmooring from many existing patterns of thought, identity, relationship, social structures and technologies is inevitable, and requires simultaneous establishment of new, and strengthening of many existing and reclaimed, means of psychological and social containment. (Bendell, 2018)

  • Psychiatry has unique contributions to make in impacting our societal trajectories and has unique obligations owing to the known mental health effects of climate change.

FEATURED THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
from the Climate Committee
PSYCHOLOGY TODAY
Environment: The Power of Language
JNMD
Climate Change and Risk of Completed Suicide
Psychiatric Times
Fostering Human Connection in a Sustainable World
Psychodynamic Psychiatry
Climate Dialectics in Psychotherapy
Psychiatric Times
Group Interventions for Climate Change Distress

LINKS TO PAST PROJECTS

Dumont, C, Haase, E et al Climate Change and Completed Suicide JNMD, 2020

E, Haase,  Climate Change and Mental Health, Chapter in
Tasman’s Psychiatry, in press

Lewis J, Haase E, Trope A, 2020. Climate Dialectics in Psychotherapy: Holding open the space between abyss and advance”, Psychodynamic Psychiatry, 48(3): 271-294 (not an official GAP publication)

Paper in Psych Times on Group Interventions for Climate Distress (Beth M, Janet; 12/20) paper in Psych Times on results of carbon footprint paper

Study of GAP members attitudes to virtual meetings, paper in Psych Times on Fostering Human Connection in a Sustainable World (Janet, Beth M, Beth H, Jeremy; 5/21)→

Wortzel JR, Stashevsky A et al, 2021. Estimation of the carbon footprint associated with attendees of the American Psychiatric Association meeting, JAMA Network Open, 4(1):e2035641. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.35641 →


Wortzel, J. D., Champlin, L. K., Wortzel, J. R., Lewis, J., Haase, E., & Mark, B. (2022). Reframing Climate Change: Using Children’s Literature as a Residency Training Tool to Address Climate Anxiety and Model Innovation. Academic Psychiatry, 46(5), 584-585.

Wortzel, J. R., Haase, E., Mark, B., Stashevsky, A., & Lewis, J. (2022). Teaching to our time: a survey study of current opinions and didactics about climate mental health training in US psychiatry residency and fellowship programs. Academic Psychiatry, 46(5), 586-587.

cochair
cochair

Co- Committee Chairs: Janet Lewis, MD and Beth Haase, MD

Members: Caroline Dumont, Alexandra Yoon, MD, Emily Schutzenhofer, MD