Why the Urgent Need for a New Approach to Mental Wellness and Resilience?
Climate science indicates that global temperatures will,in the not too distant future, rise above the 2.7-degree F. temperature threshold that unleashes civilization-changing impacts. From more extreme wildfires and hurricanes to record droughts and heat waves, some of the impacts are already evident. The public in the U.S.--and in every other nation--is unprepared for thecoming tsunami of mental health and psycho-social-spiritual problems that will result. Ifwe remain so, climate-generated psychological, emotional, spiritual, and behavioralproblems will threaten the health, safety, and wellbeing of every child andadult nationally and worldwide. They will also accelerate many physical health problems. And,they will activate a vicious cycle whereby self-protective emotional reactions block efforts to slash emissions, which worsens the climate emergency, and circle back to increase mental health and psycho-social-spiritual problems.
The New ITRC Mental Wellness and Resilience Policy
Developed through extensive research and supported by a team of 20 experts, the InternationalTransformational Resilience Coalition (ITRC) has developed a new Mental Wellness andResilience Policy to prevent and heal climate-generated psychological,emotional, spiritual, and behavioral problems. The policy calls for prevention-focused, community-based, multisystemic population-level initiatives to be launched nationwide and globally to build individual and collective resilience to push back against externally-generated climate traumas and toxic stress pileups.
In specific, the ITRC policy calls for establishing local broad-based Resilience Coordinating Councils (RCCs) that: a) offer all adults andyouth the opportunity to learn simple age and culturally-appropriate trauma-informed mental wellness and resilience information and skills; b) build and connect social support networks across economic and geographic boundaries; c) empower residents to take responsibility for resilience in their neighborhoods; and d) engage local volunteer, non-profit, private, and public organizations in the adoption of practices and policies that build a local cultural of psychological and emotional resilience.
What you willlearn during the webinar:
Why disaster mental health, individually-focused clinical therapy, and direct service programs are incapable of addressing the scale and scope of the mental health and psycho-social-spiritual problems generated by the climate emergency.
Why launching community-based population-level mental wellness and resilience initiatives is essentialto both prevent and heal the individual and collective traumas generated by the climate emergency -- and by many other social, economic, and ecological adversities as well, including the Coivid-19 pandemic.
Overview of the coreelements of community-based population-wide mental wellness and resilience building initiatives,how to organize them, and the many benefits they provide for individuals, families, non-profits, private businesses, and the public sector nationwide.
U.S. federal, state, andlocal policies needed to foster and sustain community-basedpopulation-wide mental wellness and resilience initiatives nationwide.