Climate Harms

Editor's note & Preface - Understand how to use this book

Dr. Lise Van Susteren is a general and forensic psychiatrist in Washington, DC, and an expert on the physical and psychological impacts of climate change. In 2011 she co-authored "The Psychological Effects of Global Warming on the U.S. - Why the US Mental Health System Is Not Prepared". Van Susteren is a Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at George Washington University and has been a consultant to the Executive Branch of the US government profiling world leaders.

Chapter 5 - Heat and the erosion of mental health

Robin Cooper, MD, a psychiatrist who has had a private practice in San Francisco for 40 years, is Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the UCSF Medical School, where she is actively involved in efforts to address climate change impacts on mental health and health.

Chapter 6 - Climate Change and the Black Community

Dr. Rahn K. Bailey is a forensic psychiatrist and nationally recognized expert on climate change, gun violence, intimate partner violence, and health disparities in minority populations. He is the author of two books and the co-author of more than 50 peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Bailey is a graduate of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. He served his psychiatry residency at the University of Texas-Houston, and his fellowship in forensic psychiatry at Yale. Dr. Bailey is currently Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the Louisiana State University School of Medicine in New Orleans.  He was recently elected Chair of the Global Mental Health & Psychiatry Caucus of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). In 2006 Dr Bailey was named “Physician of the Year” by the National Medical Association because of his work in Hurricane Katrina.

Chapter 7 - Camp Fire

Darla Gale is the CEO/Founder at Heartstrings Counseling, Inc. and Darla Gale Counseling, Marriage and Family Therapist, Inc. in Loomis, California. She is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and graduated with a master's degree from Brandman University in 2012. She is the author of Sifting Through the Ashes: Finding Beauty, Peace, Love, and Strength Through Trauma, which received #1 Best Seller on Amazon in the Categories of Mental Illness and Psychological Pathologies. She lives in Northern California and enjoys traveling with her husband and two dogs.

Chapter 10 - Rising Seas and Shifting Shorelines

John Englander is a renowned oceanographer and author of the recently published “Moving to Higher Ground; Rising Sea Level and the Path Forward.” He has given high-level briefings about rising sea level, to the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Naval Academy, to military leaders as well as to corporate executives, and professional societies. Englander has been CEO of several ocean-based organizations, including The Cousteau Society. His work has been featured in The New York Times and on the Discovery Channel. Englander is president of the Rising Seas Institute, a nonprofit think tank and policy center that works to advance adaptation to rising seas.

Chapter 11 - Air Pollution and mental health (Forthcoming)

Chapter 13 - The absent heart of the great climate affair

Adam Sacks is co-founder and served as Executive Director of Biodiversity for a Livable Climate until his retirement 2023.  For over twenty years he worked as a climate activist, studying, writing and making films about climate change. He holds a Bachelor's degree from Goddard College in Modern Dance, a Doctorate from UMass Amherst in Counselling, and a Doctorate in Naturopathic Medicine from Bastyr University.  For five years he directed a non-profit that worked with communities invoking basic democratic and constitutional principles to oppose detrimental local corporate activity.  In 2013 he co-founded Biodiversity for a Livable Climate where he has focused on regeneration of biodiversity and a livable planet.

Chapter 14 - Introduction to Other Vulnerable Populations...

Chapter 15 - Minorities - General Impacts on High Risk Groups

Carissa Cabán-Alemán is a community psychiatrist with years of clinical experience as medical director for behavioral health departments. She is also a faculty member of the College of Medicine of Florida International University since 2014. She was promoted from Assistant to Associate Professor and continues collaborating with FIU as Community-Based Faculty since she relocated from Florida to Puerto Rico in 2022. Some of her interests are cultural humility, social justice, structural competence, mindfulness, systems-based practice, and the impacts of climate change on mental health. She is one of the founding members of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance and CrearConSalud, Inc., a non-profit organization devoted to mental health education, awareness, and advocacy in Puerto Rico (PR). She was American Psychiatric Association (APA) Representative to the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health & board member of the American Association of Community Psychiatry (AACP). She enjoys respectfully connecting with nature’s more-than-human world, hiking, biking & horticulture. She moved back to PR in 2022 to be close to her family, focus on community work, climate health & justice projects, learn agroecology, and relocate to a farm.

Chapter 16 - Those Living With Mental Illness: A Vulnerable Population

Robin Cooper, MD, a psychiatrist who has had a private practice in San Francisco for 40 years, is Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the UCSF Medical School, where she is actively involved in efforts to address climate change impacts on mental health and health.

Chapter 17 - The Elderly and the Infirm

University of California, San Francisco, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences.

Chapter 18 - Pregnant Women and Babies (including in utero)

Dr. Vanessa Padilla trained as a psychiatrist at the University of Puerto Rico and completed a Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry Fellowship at the University of Miami (UM). She completed an Electroconvulsive Therapy Visiting Fellowship Certification at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Padilla serves as an Assistant Professor and as Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry Fellowship Program Director at the University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine. She is board-certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in Psychiatry and Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry.

Chapter 19 - Risks for Fetal Development

Dr. Dolores Malaspina is a physician-scientist serving as a Professor of Psychiatry, Neuroscience, and Genetics/Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in NY. She was previously Professor and Chairman of Psychiatry at the NYU Department of Psychiatry and Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University /New York State Psychiatric Institute, where she had trained.  At each center, she has launched clinical research endeavors in severe mental illness. The breadth of her interest in the diverse underpinnings of psychiatric conditions is shaped by undergraduate training in environmental biology, an MS in zoology, epidemiology training at Columbia University and postdoctoral training in genetics. She was the first to propose that paternal age was a main risk factor for schizophrenia, now supported, that hippocampal blood flow changes characterized psychosis, recently showing its association with the gut-brain axis. She and colleagues consider the impact of climate change on the next generation through prenatal effects. She also serves on the steering committee for psychiatric diagnoses and the research council for the American Psychiatric Association.

Chapter 20 - Climate Change and environmental justice (Forthcoming)

Jacqui Patterson is the founder and executive director of The Chisholm Legacy Project: A Resource Hub for Black Frontline Climate Justice Leadership.

Chapter 21 - first peoples as first climate refugees?

Dr. Rosen has worked as a community psychiatrist in Barkinje (=River People”) Aboriginal tribal lands of the remote Far West region of New South Wales (NSW) regularly for 35+ years, much of this time while also leading Royal North Shore University General Hospital & Community Mental Health Services in Sydney Australia. As a Fellow of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists since 1981, and an Officer of the Order of Australia since 2014, He is academically affiliated with the Brain & Mind Centre (BMC), University of Sydney, and the Australian Health Services Research Institute (AHSRI) at the University of Wollongong (Australia).

Professor Pat Dudgeon is from the Bardi people in Western Australia. She is a psychologist and professor at the Poche Centre for Aboriginal Health and the School of Indigenous Studies at UWA. Her area of research includes Indigenous social and emotional wellbeing and suicide prevention.

Stewart Sutherland, PhD was born and raised in Wellington NSW the heart of Wiradjuri country. For over a decade he has worked in Indigenous health, in more recent years focusing on identity and mental health particularly Social and Emotional Wellbeing of the Stolen Generations (people forcibly removed from their families). Stewart completed his PhD at the Australian National University Canberra, the focus of which was the interplay between reconciliation (apology) and the social emotional wellbeing of people forcibly removed from their families. Stewart is working at the ANU School of Medicine as the lecturer of indigenous Health, where he is building on work of those before him, to ensure that Indigenous health and people are at the core.

Chapter 22 - Mental health impacts on Inuit communities: “We are a part of the land, and the land is part of us”

Ashlee Cunsolo, PhD, is the founding Dean of the School of Arctic and Subarctic Studies and the Labrador Campus of Memorial University, a former Canada Research Chair (Tier II), and a Member Emeritus of the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists. As a social science and health researcher, Ashlee works at the intersection of place, culture, health, and environment, and has been working for 14 years in partnership with Indigenous communities and leaders across Canada, particularly in Labrador, on community-led and community-identified research initiatives, including climate change impacts on physical and mental health and cultural reclamation.  She is a leading voice internationally on climate change, mental health, and ecological grief, a regular contributor to media and policy, and editor of Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Grief and Loss.

Chapter 23 - Role of Air Pollution and Temperature on pregnancy

Bruce Bekkar is a women’s health physician and international keynote speaker engaged with the climate crisis since 2007. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Climate Change and Health and as a Fellow and member of the Leadership Circle Executive Committee at ecoAmerica in Washington, DC. At home in Southern California, he is Chair Emeritus of the Public Health Advisory Council and a public health consultant for the County of San Diego Regional Decarbonization Framework. Bruce has given over 100 presentations on climate change to a wide range of audiences including the American Meteorological Society, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, Genentech, England’s Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the California State Senate and members of the U.S. House of Representatives.  Bruce is the lead author of the first large-scale review of birth impacts and climate change in the US, published in JAMA in June 2020. He and Dr. Nate DeNicola host “Green Docs,” a new podcast at the intersection of women’s health, pregnancy outcomes, and our environment.

Chapter 24 - Climate Impacts on Young People: in the Eye of the Storm

Caroline Hickman is a lecturer at the University of Bath in social work and climate psychology, a psychotherapist & member of the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA). Caroline works with schools, parent groups, youth activist groups, and as a psychotherapist with children, young people & adults dealing with eco-anxiety and distress about the climate & biodiversity crisis. Through the University of Bath, she has been researching children & young people’s feelings about the climate and biodiversity crisis for 5 years to uncover and explore different stories, narratives, and images around our defenses against the 'difficult truth' we are facing. Her research is with children & young people in the UK, Sweden, Brazil, USA, Maldives, Nigeria & Bangladesh.

Chapter 25 - Pre-traumatic Stress