Tagged With "Black Americans"
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How a natural disaster led one town to do something about its ACEs, past and future
Tracy Franke, principal of Darrington Elementary School, a K-8 school with 300 students, had heard about CLEAR, and called Dr. Christopher Blodgett, who runs the program, to arrange a visit from Turner. “We were hurting,” says Franke. “Our students and staff needed some tools to get through the trauma.”
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How Does Water Scarcity Affect Mental Health? [psmag.com]
A nearly two-decade drought has drained the Colorado River, leaving regulators scrambling to protect the waterway, which provides water to 40 million people across seven states. Colorado officials are treating the situation as an emergency, the Aspen Times reports . But their efforts may come too late; the Bureau of Reclamation predicts a 57 percent chance that the river's largest reservoir will be too low to give each state its agreed-upon share by 2020, according to a Colorado Public Radio...
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How the Mental Health Community Is Bracing for the Impact of Climate Change “Eco-anxiety” and trauma from natural disasters will be on the rise along with sea levels
Rolling Stone, May 16, 2019 By Andrea Marks When San Francisco broke heat records in 2017, with 106-degree temperatures in September, psychiatrist Robin Cooper didn’t hear until after the fact that one of her patients had been feeling dizzy and feverish. One day, he’d fainted in his poorly ventilated workspace. Emergency room doctors had surmised he’d had a virus. But Cooper warned him it could actually be a drug she’d prescribed him interacting with the extreme heat. Certain antipsychotic...
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How Two Local Communities Are Fighting Back Against the Trauma of Global Climate Change
In Alertnet: February 24, 2018 By Ruben Cantu, program manager for community trauma, mental health and violence prevention at Prevention Institute , and ITRC Steering Committee Member Found at: https://www.alternet.org/environment/global-climate-change-causing-local-trauma-heres-how-two-communities- We must build resilient communities before disaster strikes. Communities around the globe are feeling the effects of climate change, from scorching heat waves and out-of-control wildfires to...
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Hurricane Florence first responders receive free trauma/resilience training
In a webinar offered this morning by Elaine Miller Karas , executive director of the Trauma Resource Institute in Claremont, CA, leaders from several North Carolina ACEs Connection communities affected by flooding and other damage by Hurricane Florence learned more about trauma response and how to better help their communities find resilience. Karas, who was delivering her Community Resiliency Model (CRM) training at Duke University in Durham, NC, offered the free training and provided...
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Hurricane Michael: Children Face Stress Of Upended Lives [health.wusf.usf.edu]
When Tiffany Harris and her two children emerged from their hotel after Hurricane Michael roared past, her 3-year-old son pointed to a sea of fallen trees and shattered buildings. "It's broken. It's broken, Mommy, fix it," she recalls her little boy Amari begging. Harris, who lives with her boyfriend, two children, plus her sister and her four children near Panama City, soon learned their town house was uninhabitable. Everything was a total loss after Michael powered inland across the...
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Lingering long after a storm, mold and mental health issues
From: The Daily Climate https://www.dailyclimate.org/lingering-long-after-a-storm-mold-and-mental-health-issues-2626706100.html?rebelltitem=2#rebelltitem2 Editor's note: This story is part of a series examining the social and health injustices resulting from increasingly intense storms and is the result of a collaboration between EHN and Scalawag Magazine , an independent nonprofit magazine that covers the American South. North Carolinians are organizing against "toxic resiliency," focused...
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MENTAL TOLL OF CLIMATE CHANGE HITS WOMEN 60% MORE
in OZY, By Stephen Starr July 25, 2019 https://www.ozy.com/acumen/mental-toll-of-climate-change-hits-women-60-more/94796 It’s long been argued that climate change will see our cities flooded, our forests reduced to ash and our weather turn increasingly violent and unpredictable. But research has found that the downside of living in a hotter, less-climate-stable world may not be limited only to buildings, trees and weather: A recently released report suggests climate change may actually...
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New York Life and Change in Mind Institute at the Alliance for Strong Families and Communites Partner on Grant Program to Support Communities Impacted by Disaster
WASHINGTON, D.C., June 1, 2018 – New York Life Insurance Company and the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities today announced the launch of a new grant program to support children, adults, families, and communities experiencing trauma resulting from natural disaster or community-wide tragedy. The partnership will serve as the first-ever disaster-focused grant for the New York Life Foundation, the charitable arm of the company. The program, Building Resilience in the Face of Disaster,...
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Oregon bill takes preventive approach to psycho-social-spiritual impacts of climate change
A hearing will be held on April 3 on a recently introduced bill ( SB 1037 ) to create a task force to determine how to make resilience training available to all Oregonians in response to climate change. Under the bill, an 18-member task force would be created to study aspects of psychological, emotional, and psychosocial resilience education and skills training. The Oregon members of the International Transformation Resilience Coalition (ITRC), including ITRC coordinator, Bob Doppelt, have...
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Psychologists from 40 countries pledged to use their jobs to address climate change
By Zoë Schlanger November 15, 2019 Quartz The leaders of psychological associations from more than 40 countries signed a proclamation this week at a conference on psychology and global health in Lisbon, pledging to use their expertise as psychologists to “take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.” Already, psychologists have recognized that climate change is a threat to psychological health. But with this move, psychological associations from around the world are signaling...
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Resources on Some Mental Health Organization Responses to Climate Change
After a recent ITRC Steering committee meeting, member Dr. David Pollack sent the following resources ITRC members might be interested in: Climate Psychiatry Alliance (CPA) website, recently launched and which will hopefully be updated regularly with lots of useful information about climate and mental health issues, including the slide presentations we have been putting on at various meetings, brief summaries of key issues, etc. www.climatepsychiatry. org Medical Society Consortium on...
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Rising from the Ashes: How Trauma-Informed Care Nurtures Healing in Rural America [The Rural Monitor]
By Jenn Lukens April 17, 2019 It was late July 2018 when the Mendocino Complex wildfire broke out in rural Lake County, California. It burned more than 450,000 acres and destroyed 280 structures before it was contained. Ana Santana managed to fill some storage bins with sentimental items – her kids’ blankets, pictures, and art projects – before fleeing her home. Santana is the facilitator of the Lake County Children’s Council and Program Director for Healthy Start Youth and Family Services ,...
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The Case of Juliana v. U.S. — Children and the Health Burdens of Climate Change [NEJM.org]
Renee N. Salas, M.D., M.P.H., Wendy Jacobs, J.D., and Frederica Perera, Dr.P.H., Ph.D. On June 4, 2019, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in Juliana v. United States to determine whether the case will proceed to trial in district court in Oregon. Nearly 4 years ago, 21 children and adolescents between 8 and 19 years of age, including Kelsey Juliana from Oregon, filed suit against the federal government, charging that the government’s inaction on addressing climate...
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The Environmental Burden of Generation Z [washingtonpost.com]
By Jason Plautz, The Washington Post Magazine, February 3, 2020 The teenagers pour off buses near Denver’s Union Station under a baking September sun. Giggling with excitement at skipping out on Friday classes, they join a host of others assembled near the terminal. Native American drummers and dancers rouse the crowd, and there’s a festive feeling in the air. But this is no festival. The message these young people have come to send to their city, to their state, to the nation — to the world...
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Tomorrow's Doctors Will Diagnose the Mental Toll of Climate Change
The Daily Dose, July 22, 2019 by Carly Stern https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/tomorrows-doctors-will-diagnose-the-mental-toll-of-climate-change/95540 First-year medical student Anna Goshua was interviewing an emergency room physician in March to learn more about the job when she heard about a patient who had come all the way from Puerto Rico to that ER in Massachusetts for health care. Hurricane Maria had wiped out all prospects of the patient seeking care at home. A surprised Goshua pored...
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Update on ITRC Activities Since January 1, 2018
Below is a summary of what the ITRC has been up to in the past few months: 1. Conference on Preparing People for Climate Change In California After a slow start on registrations, the Jan 24-25 conference in Oakland ended up being sold out. On a scale of 1-5 (with 5 being excellent and 1 being poor), the 95 evaluations we received (out of 140 attendees) average out at 4.65, which we consider to be excellent. Two people said the conference changed their lives (one emailed afterwards to say...
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Using the Climate Crisis as Catalyst to Increase Wellbeing
I wrote this article for Meeting of the Minds, which brings urban leaders together. It explains the recommendations of the ITRC for using the climate crisis as a transformational catalyst to enhance personal, social, and ecological wellbeing. Found here: https://meetingoftheminds.org/building-transformational-resilience-to-cope-with-climate-disruption-28559 A year after Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico in 2017, many residents continue to struggle with mental illness. One suicide...
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Want to Survive Climate Change? You’ll Need a Good Community [Wired.com]
In the summer of 1995, a blistering heat wave settled over Chicago for three days. It killed 739 people, making it one of the most unexpectedly lethal disasters in modern American history. No statistical models of the heat wave predicted such a high death toll. Researchers in the American Journal of Public Health reported that their analysis “failed to detect relationships between the weather and mortality that would explain what happened.” Just as mysterious as the number of fatalities was...
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Webinar Slides and Recording: Transformational Resilience for Climate Change Traumas and Toxic Stresses with Bob Doppelt
Recorded live October 28, 2019. Find the slides attached below. The webinar recording: You will learn: how climate change creates personal, family, and community traumas and toxic stresses; how those traumatic stressors trigger feedbacks that expand and aggravate ACEs and many other person, social, community, and societal maladies; why current approaches are woefully inadequate to address what is already occurring and rapidly steaming toward us and why prevention is the only realistic...
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Webinar Slides and Recording: Transformational Resilience for Climate Change Traumas and Toxic Stresses with Bob Doppelt
Recorded live October 28, 2019. Find the slides attached below. The webinar recording: You will learn: how climate change creates personal, family, and community traumas and toxic stresses; how those traumatic stressors trigger feedbacks that expand and aggravate ACEs and many other person, social, community, and societal maladies; why current approaches are woefully inadequate to address what is already occurring and rapidly steaming toward us and why prevention is the only realistic...
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After the wildfire: treating the mental health crisis triggered by climate change
Note from ITRC Coordinator Bob Doppelt: This story illustrates exactly why we organized the ITRC. Post trauma treatment is completely insufficient to address the traumas that lie ahead as temperatures rise. Prevention , by building widespread capacity for Transformational Resilience for all types of climate impacts--is the ONLY viable solution. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In 2017, thousands of homes in Santa...
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American Climate: Personal Stories of Shattered Lives
Rising temperatures are strengthening the destructive force of wildfires, hurricanes and floods, putting tens of millions of Americans at risk. Tens of thousands of Americans are already paying a high price, their lives shattered by climate calamities. Here are twenty-one of their stories. Found here: https://insideclimatenews.org/american-climate
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American Public Health Association Climate Change and Mental Health Updates
ITRC Steering Committee Member Natasha DeJarnett, Policy Analyst , Environmental Health at APHA, offered these updates and resources on activities she and APHA are engaged in: · Citizen’s Climate Lobby Podcast episode on climate change and mental wellness featuring ITRC Steering Committee member Dr. Lise Van Susteren and Dr. Natasha DeJarnett: https://soundcloud.com/ citizensclimateradio/ep-23- mental-wellness-and-climate- change · APHA released the new report Adaptation in Action Part II...
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Article shows how climate change can generate harmful psychosocial maladies
This article underscores how, left unaddressed, climate change can quickly become a psychosocial malady and why we must think in much broader terms than merely mental health (psychological) problems. Traumatized and fearful people often retreat into a self-protective survival mode that leads them to believe/support authoritarians who say they can fix the problem. Bob Doppelt Climate Kings: How a new generation of authoritarian leaders are using climate change to seize power By Samuel Miller...
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Climate Anxiety
I worked on David Attenborough’s documentary. The grim reality gave me climate anxiety Liv Grant For the BBC’s Climate Change: The Facts, I met those living on the frontline. I struggled to cope with what I learned Sun 28 Apr 2019 11.56 EDT Last modified on Mon 29 Apr 2019 06.42 EDT W e live in a time of loss. Wild places dwindle, the animals and plants that live in them disappear. Climate change is now a certainty, and it will without a doubt lead to the loss of land, species, and ways of...
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Climate change and mental health: risks, impacts and priority actions
This is one of the better assessments of the psychological and psychosocial impacts of climate change, though it neglects some key issues. International Journal of Mental Health Systems, October 2018, by Katie Hayes et al. Abstract Background: This article provides an overview of the current and projected climate change risks and impacts to mental health and provides recommendations for priority actions to address the mental health consequences of climate change. Discussion and conclusion:...
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Climate Change is Bad for Your Mental Health [psmag.com]
The world has only a dozen years to act to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, and stave off the most catastrophic effects of climate change, according to the latest report from the United Nation's top climate science panel out Monday. Without rapid and drastic action, climate change will expose hundreds of millions more people to heat waves, sea-level rise, more extreme weather events—and, according to a new study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of...
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Climate Change Isn’t Just Frying the Planet—It’s Fraying Our Nerves [motherjones.com]
By Rowan Walrath, Mother Jones, February 18, 2019 Over the last year, Rebecca, a 35-year-old woman living in Washington, DC, had been losing sleep over the seemingly endless flow of apocalyptic environmental news. She fretted about the Trump administration’s loosening of emissions regulations and the United Nations’ dire predictions about climate change. In October, she sought help from a psychiatrist who put her on an antidepressant. “It sort of saps your emotional reserves,” she says,...
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Climate Change Isn’t Just Frying the Planet—It’s Fraying Our Nerves “We kind of lose our cool.”
Rowan Walrath, Feb 18, 2019 Mother Jones Over the last year, Rebecca, a 35-year-old woman living in Washington, DC, had been losing sleep over the seemingly endless flow of apocalyptic environmental news. She fretted about the Trump administration’s loosening of emissions regulations and the United Nations’ dire predictions about climate change. In October, she sought help from a psychiatrist who put her on an antidepressant. “It sort of saps your emotional reserves,” she says, “this...
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CLIMATE CHANGE'S LOOMING MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS
Science Matt Simon 8.02.18 FOR THE INUIT of Labrador in Canada, climate disaster has already arrived. These indigenous people form an intense bond with their land, hunting for food and fur. “People like to go out on the land to feel good,” says Noah Nochasak in the documentary Lament for the Land . “If they can’t go out on the land, travel a long ways to feel good, they don’t feel like people.” The Inuit’s lands, though, are warming twice as fast as the global average, imperiling the ice...
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Community After Disaster, a Therapist’s Musings
Here in Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino counties, the entire community experienced prolonged and extensive hyper-arousal – days on end of watching and wondering where the fires would burn next, and far too many sleepless nights. According to the literature on disasters, what follows is a brief honeymoon period, characterized by community cohesion and gratitude. Sonoma County showed up for each other in major ways in the past couple of weeks, and the outpouring of gratitude to the first responders...
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‘Eco-anxiety’ is a crushing weight for many young Canadians. And they say schools aren’t doing enough
By Natasha Comeau Special to the Star Feb. 23, 2020 During Yellowknife’s first Fridays For Future climate change march last fall, Dr. Courtney Howard spoke about her experience with a condition called eco-anxiety to “the most Yellowknifers I’ve seen in one spot.” She asked the young crowd — an estimated 1,000 people — to raise their hands if they also find themselves worried about climate change, and she watched “all these little hands go up.” Every day, young people are immersed in...
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Opinion: I'm a Black Climate Expert. Racism Derails Our Efforts to Save the Planet. [billmoyers.com]
By Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Moyers on Democracy, June 24, 2020 Here is an incomplete list of things I left unfinished last week because America’s boiling racism and militarization are deadly for Black people: a policy memo to members of Congress on accelerating offshore wind energy development in US waters; the introduction to my book on climate solutions; a presentation for a powerful corporation on how technology can advance ocean-climate solutions; a grant proposal to fund a network of...
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Invitation to Sept 22 webinar on the ITRC Mental Wellness and Resilience Policy
In case you missed the first one: I nvitation to Tuesday Sept. 22 free webinar on... The Urgent Need, Methods, and Benefits of Enacting the New ITRC Mental Wellness and Resilience Policy for Climate Change--and Other--Adversities You are invited to a free 1 hr. webinar on Tuesday , September 22 from 12:30-1:30 pm PST (3:30-4:30 pm EST) on the new ITRC Mental Wellness and Resilience Policy Click here to register for the free webinar or go to the ITRC Website:...
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"A Better Normal" Community Discussion Series- Our Reckoning with Race and Equity at ACEs Connection
Register for A Better Normal- Our reckoning with race and equity at ACEs Connection
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Applications Now Being Accepted for ITRC Free 9-Week Training Program on Community-based Mental Wellness and Resilience
ITRC Training Program begins on Tuesday February 9 and includes CE Credits from the American Public Health Association For a detailed description and schedule, and to apply to attend, go to the ITRC website: http://www.theresourceinnovationgroup.org/
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Please Read This Article: Preparing for Climate Overshoot Requires Quickly Expanding Our Mental Health System
All mental health and social service leaders are urged to read the attached article Preparing for Climate Overshoot Requires Quickly Expanding Our Mental Health System . It describes: How this decade or early next global temperatures will likely surpass the 2.7 F temperature threshold that unleashes extremely destructive and possibly irreversible impacts on the planet and society (climate scientists call this "climate overshoot") How, if we remain unprepared, the climate overshoot will...
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Request for Organizational and Individual Endorsements of Letter Urging Congress to Introduce and Enact the "Resilience for All Act of 2021"
Please consider making an organizational and/or individual endorsements on a letter below (and attached) to Congress calling for the Introduction and Enactment of the "Resilience for All Act of 2021." The deadline for endorsing the letter is September 30. To the Honorable Chuck Schumer Majority Leader United States Senate 322 Hart Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510 To the Honorable Mitch McConnell Minority Leader United States Senate 317 Russell Senate Office Building Washington, DC...
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Time is Running Out to for PACES Connection Members to Endorse Letter to Congress Supporting the "Resilience for All Act of 2021."
Please join over 50 organizations & 175 professionals that have endorsed the letter. Endorsers range from the American Association of Community Psychiatry, to the Alliance of Nurses for a Healthy Environment, The Prevention Institute, Black Psychiatrists of America, Physicians for Social Responsibility, American Association of Suicidology, and more than 45 other diverse national, regional, and local organizations. Request for Organizational and Individual Endorsements of Letter Below...
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Over 80 Orgs. Call on Congress to Engage Whole Communities in Trauma Prevention and Healing by Introducing and Enacting the "Resilience for All Act of 2021"
The International Transformational Resilience Coalition (ITRC) today released a letter to Congress calling for the introduction and enactment of the "Resilience for All Act of 2021." The letter is endorsed by over 80 national, state, and local mental health and human services organizations from across the nation, and by over 240 individual professionals. The letter can be found on page three of this document. Overview : The "Resilience for All Act of 2021" will, for the first time, make the...
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Climate change is 'first and foremost' a health crisis, new report finds (yahoo.com)
Working construction under the merciless Arizona sun, Eleazar Castellanos knew the signs that heat exhaustion was settling in. On the days when the temperature would top 100 degrees, he and his coworkers would sweat profusely. Then came the cramps in their arms and legs, and the overwhelming urge to stop: take a break, get some water, cool down. But they couldn’t. Not if they wanted to get paid and return home to their families as breadwinners. “Many of the employers don’t understand, we...
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How do we empower youth in face of the climate crisis?
Whether you are a parent or a guardian, a teacher or a school administrator, if you have children in your life, you might hear them talking about climate change. Whether it’s wildfires or floods or tsunamis and tornados, these events are happening with increasing frequency all around us. Climate change may once have been an abstract concept or foreign idea, but it is now our reality. Young people are more aware than ever of the threats to the planet’s future and are getting involved...
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Last chance to register for Sept 13 webinar on using public mental health approach for the climate crisis
LAST CHANCE TO REGISTER For Next Tuesday's Sept. 13 Webinar on the Need To Use a Public Health Approach in Communities to Build Population Mental Wellness & Resilience for the Climate Crisis The Webinar Will Describe the ITRC Community of Practice (CoP) that Begins in October on How to Organize and Operate Public Mental Health Initiatives in Communities. To register for the September 13 webinar go to the ITRC website: http://www.theresourceinnovationgroup.org/ The Climate Crisis Requires...