Mental Health and Climate Change Task Force Kick-Off

Please save the date for the Task Force Kick Off, which will be held from 3:00–5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, October 16, in the Langley Porter Auditorium (LP-190). This will be an informative and collaborative meeting to discuss how we can make the task force as effective and impactful as possible. Please RSVP to Adri Jayaratne (adri.jayaratne@ucsf.edu) if you can attend. We will provide a detailed agenda and speakers for the Kick Off soon. Please forward this invitation to others you think would be interested in joining us.

The mission of the task force will be to foster awareness of the climate crisis and its wider ecological and psychosocial reverberations, not only within our department, but also across campus and our community partners. In the face of mounting crises and resource constraints, we are committed to preserving the benefits of the psychiatric milestones of the 20th century, while applying scientifically and clinically valid climate research and knowledge to transform mental health care to properly respond to the climate crisis of the 21st century. The task force will also focus on finding methods to incorporate our efforts on this front into all of our missions: research, education, patient care, and public service.
 
Climate change is already having profound and under-researched effects on mental health and delivery of care. These consequences intersect with crises in homelessness, immigration, and other forms of displacement. We know that climate-related distress is occurring among our department members, the larger university community, and the patients and populations we serve. It is important to confront and process this distress as we make efforts to prevent and mitigate climate change.
 
Through the work of the task force, we hope our department can become a leader on this issue and in the burgeoning field of climate psychiatry through aligned efforts in education and research, service coordination, and low-emission, high-quality operations.