GCPH Seminar Series 18: Lecture 2 - Dr Gary Belkin

The social crisis within the climate crisis

A psychiatrist who approaches mental health as a building block of social policy and progress, Gary recently founded Billion Minds as a non-profit policy and “think-action tank.” The intention of Billion Minds is to link mental health to problems of great scale, specifically to the climate crisis, and to safeguarding sustainable societies through a humane social climate. 

In this seminar, Dr Belkin explored what climate change means for population mental health, the need to redesign our mental health system, what a ‘next system’ looks like, and what we need to do get there. He showed that as the effects of environmental and climate change grow in severity, reach, frequency and mental health and social impact, so will the demands on an already over-burdened mental health system. He argued that the ‘social climate’ – emotional resilience, social ties, collective efficacy – requires consideration in the face of climate challenges to create a mental health ecosystem that can not only meet overwhelming prevention needs and illness care, but also help anchor scaled civic and collective action to do much of the work of adapting to and mitigating the climate and environmental change itself.