Discourse on climate change has intensified in recent years as heat waves, floods, and hurricanes have impacted developed countries in the last three years. While a fair proportion of responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions, global warming and environmental impact is attributable to the Global North, low-middle income countries (LMICs) are more vulnerable to the repercussions of climate change.

Bangladesh faces cyclones, earthquakes, droughts, and floods regularly as one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world. Approximately 135 million people in Bangladesh have been affected by disasters in the last 20 years, including loss of life, injury and homelessness. This exacerbates issues of psychosocial distress, poverty, livelihood, food insecurity, and access to education. Similarly, Haiti and Malawi have also suffered as their systems are unable to address droughts, hurricanes and floods, resulting in widespread distress.

In parallel, mental health has also drawn more attention, especially around the pandemic. While discussions around the intersection of climate change and mental health are nascent, it is clear that both disciplines are Euro-centric and have a top-down scientific expert approach. Discourse neglects, (often deliberately) the effects of industrial economies, electronic waste dumping, deforestation for elite settlements, and the disproportionate impact of western neoliberalism on the environment.

The seamless shift to finding “solutions” without acknowledging that countries have been facing disasters for over 20 years makes it easy to predict that the intersection of the two fields will reflect hegemonic narratives. This is already visible in research and policy – which is scientific, biomedical and disproportionately Global North led. Thus it was necessary to centre experiences from South Asia, one of the regions said to be hardest hit by climate change, in this issue.

While the ambit of ReFrame has always been South Asia, there has been a focus on India. As it occupies a hegemonic role in this region, it was even more important to ensure representation from countries such as Bhutan, Pakistan and Afghanistan.  We tried hard but failed to bring narratives from the Maldives which is often neglected as part of South Asia but is critical in terms of climate change issues faced by Small Island Developing States (SIDS).

However, it is not enough to draw lines based on Global North versus Global South – which is, reductive, as binaries tend to be. While Western imperialism and its legacies are named and visibilised, Global South countries also engage in settler colonialism and neo-liberal economics that continue to oppress marginalised communities. This is reflected across the lines of caste, gender, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, and disability. 

India’s indigenous groups – Adivasi/ Tribal ethnic communities continue to face the brunt of extractivism, settler politics, and the destruction of natural resources. Yet, Adivasi and other indigenous communities worldwide are at the margins of both climate and mental health discourse. The communities most vulnerable to, and most impacted by climate extremes and mental health systems are the ones most marginalised in both fields’ narratives, research, services, and policy. So, this issue also focusses on how disabled persons are invisibilised and oppressed in specific ways in both of these discourses. Individualised narratives of climate activism and mental health are also classist, casteist, and ableist, in addition to being ineffective

That is why disability justice and social justice must be a central lens for addressing mental health and climate change by acknowledging the existence of power imbalance, contexts of oppression, both in terms of vulnerability to and lack of access to recourse. The North-South divide obfuscates and invisibilises shared oppressions and stands in the way of building movements and allyship. Thus, starting with this issue of ReFrame, we hope to foreground voices from historically marginalised folx from any geography and not just South Asia. 

Therefore, the first section, “Re-vision”, in ReFrame, begins by building perspective on shades of power and justice through indigenous, disability, and caste lens; that challenge hegemonic approaches. Alice Barwa and Kyle Hill discuss Adivasi/Indigenous identities, knowledges, and prescriptions on climate justice and mental health. Dr. Ingole and Camellia Biswas reflect on climate injustice and Dalit distress. Ayisha Siddiqa challenges Eurocentric approaches to youth mental health and climate change, while Dr. Asha Hans details challenges faced by women with psychosocial disabilities during disasters. 

The “Contexts” section explores how climate change and advocacy affect folx in varied settings, from Adivasi activists to young Afghan citizens to disabled persons. Dayamani Barla writes on historical and ongoing engagement with climate justice; Ahmad Nisar details the mental health implications of conflict, environment, and poverty in Afghanistan; Chhaya Namchu focusses on the adversities and solidarities of women in transboundary river regions. Candice D’Souza writes on the structural exclusion of disabled persons in climate change and disaster relief;  Kusala Wettasinghe traces the need for a climate change perspective in crisis-hit Sri Lanka’s progressive Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) field. Rituraj Phukan addresses the exclusion of indigenous communities from the Eastern Himalayas and Abhishek Annica details how climate change needs to centre disability justice.  

The final section, “Engage” shares on-ground examples, such as Manshi Asher’s documentation of youth-led struggles and collective action in the West Himalayas, while another piece locates mental health and community-led work in the Darjeeling Himalaya socio-ecology. Contributors from Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action write on environmental justice in urban landscapes, and Kumar and Nair write on mental health in Kerala’s coastal communities. Using the example of Majuli, Assam, Oja lays out policy recommendations while Choden explores the need for disability to be foregrounded in Bhutan’s policy frameworks. Finally, Mitra explores questions of parenthood and climate change in the therapy room. 
 
Working on this issue of ReFrame, I realise that issues of accessible and affirmative mental health have been referred to as gaps for far too long when, in fact, these are systemic failures.