Policy and Affirmative Action

“Development” paradigms tend to be equated with progress and the pursuit of quality of life but are dictated by Western and unsustainable industrial, neo-liberal economic motives. The role of the environment, labour chains, unpaid care work, and a structural lack of fundamental human rights, are among the multiple factors that enable this model of development to continue. The above factors remain invisibilised, unaccounted for, or devalued in both the mental health and climate change arenas. 

Thus, both require a review of colonial residues and the status quo of economic and political systems. Each also requires a shift in its narrative from being centred around development, “progress,” and the productivity of people to bringing about care and systemic change. This is impossible as long as the political power of hegemonising climate discourse remains in the hands of “experts” who are situated in the Global North, even as they continue to accumulate knowledge and set research agendas built on drawing data from the Global South. There needs to be a radical re-envisioning of mental health care in policy and services for climate-induced distress. Such conversations have to surpass the search for biological causal links behind distress. Mental health advocacy needs to rally for more than therapeutic access and clinician rooms. In both community care and clinical intervention, we need to incorporate a rights-based lens and equip practitioners to respond to structures of oppression, that is socio-cultural, economic, geopolitical, and policy-based. 

It is important to navigate climate distress through affirmative lenses informed by an understanding of class inequality, historical uprooting, generational loss, colonial history, and racial, casteist, and gendered inaccessibility to recourse. Psychosocial justice demands fighting against the reification of climate disasters and their effects as inevitable, unstoppable consequences. 

Further, beyond the mainstream ideas of resilience and “fighting back from adversity,” clinical work needs to go beyond just “cognitive appraising” and contribute to the network-building of tangible avenues toward employment, housing, and food security for uprooted communities. Approaches to conflict zones, disaster areas, and refugee resettlement need to redefine the goals of empowerment as a sustained process and not a short-term product.

The voices of marginalised indigenous communities, rural feminised labour forces, disabled communities, homeless people, queer trans folx, and industrial labourers are informed by the subaltern experience of climate injustice and its mental health impact. Climate policy and mental health policy will only see integration and pedestalisation of rights when efforts of all climate protection, post-disaster material, and community rehabilitation will be anchored in peer groups, community organising, social safety nets and, people’s movements by those at the margins of both climate and mental health systems. Radicalising climate policy and mental health in a more just and humane direction will require disproportionate bias and prioritisation of people and communities, not material success.

This is impossible as long as the political power of hegemonising climate discourse remains in the hands of “experts” who are situated in the Global North, even as they continue to accumulate knowledge and set research agendas built on drawing data from the Global South.