Mental Health and Climate Change: When a Global Crisis and Planetary Emergency Collide

May 8, 2025

The Petrie-Flom Center, Harvard Law School Project on Disability (HPOD), and GlobalMentalHealth@Harvard Initiative hosted an online, interdisciplinary panel of experts who explored the potentially devastating interplay between climate change and psychosocial disabilities, took stock of both the current state of research on this interplay as well as the efficacy of private and public interventions at this critical intersection, and pointed to the roles that key stakeholders must play to prevent the ongoing mental health crisis in many parts of the world from being supercharged by the global climate emergency.

Welcoming Remarks: Susannah Baruch, Executive Director, Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics

Moderator: Michael Ashley Stein, Executive Director, HPOD

Panelists:
– Pat Dudgeon, Research Fellow, Poche Centre for Indigenous Health, School of Indigenous Studies, University of Western Australia
– Asha Hans, Former Professor of Political Science & Director of Women’s Studies, Utkal University
– Leo Goldsmith, Ph.D. student, Yale School of the Environment
– Walid Yassin, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
– Lise van Susteren, psychiatrist & environmental activist

Concluding Remarks: Vikram Patel, The Pershing Square Professor of Global Health & Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Learn more at https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/events/details/mental-health-and-climate-change-when-a-global-crisis-and-planetary-emergency-collide/

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