Good morning, everyone. How's everyone doing? We might as well get started. Hopefully some more folks will come in. It's Tuesday at 8 o'clock, so I understand. My name is Andre Marseille. I am a doctor of psychology and counseling at Chicago State University. I also have a private practice. Can you guys hear me, or should I talk into the mic? OK. Private practice called Safe Paces in Chicago and in Washington, DC. And I really have a appreciation for existentialism. That's one of my focuses, and climate change as it relates to mental health. Other areas that I do research in is anxiety and trauma, positive psychotherapy. Anybody familiar with positive psychotherapy? Not positive psychology. Not Seligman. I don't like him. That's a personal thing. But positive psychotherapy, Dr. Nourshad Picheshkin. We survived in Germany. So I'm one of three positive psychotherapists in the United States. Most of the training is done in either Germany or London, and a lot in China, actually. I'll talk a little bit about that, because it does relate to some of the stuff I'll talk about in terms of mental health in the presentation. But first and foremost, my last area of interest and passion is multiculturalism and diversity. So I teach a lot of multicultural classes and do a lot of multicultural diversity trainings. So that's a little bit about me. But today's topic is about climate change and mental health from an existential perspective. And we're going to talk about what that means in terms of what it means to be from an existential perspective, to kind of put this in context. So the agenda, talk about existentialism. We'll talk a little bit about climate change, the existential view of existence, threats to existence from an existential perspective, mental health impacts, impacts on communities, and what can we do, if anything. I want to start with an introductory video to kind of set the context for us before we get into some heavy discussion. So let me pull that video up. As we become older, we will become more vulnerable. Okay, hold on, let me start this from the beginning. These are quite emotional, aren't they? I've been concerned and now terrified of hastening climate change for about 20 years. I'm worried that a local natural disaster might happen while our grandchildren are here with us. I'm worried that as we become older, we will become more vulnerable to living in rural areas and may have to move. I do worry about the future for grandchildren and their children after this because there is going to be so much change. Climate change is such an anxiety-inducing phenomenon. I relate to every single one of our worries, like worrying about yourself, about the future generations, about the people on the front lines of the climate crisis. The water rose to two metres over the roof of my raised home in North Lismore. I was a renter. My landlord was unable to claim his flood insurance due to the damages exceeding the amount he was insured for, over $320,000. We have nowhere else to go, like so many of us. We are forced to live where it isn't safe because there isn't affordable housing. It's heartbreaking. How is our community going to recover after so many major catastrophes? People have been living in tents for months and we know this is going to happen again. People risk their lives saving the lives of others. Where is the support for them and what's going to happen next time? It's obviously really, really sad. It's horrible that these people are having to go through that. I'm now retired and looking at a bill of $80,000 worth of damages that will destroy my retirement savings. The Federal Government is still supporting fossil fuel companies, when in reality those same companies are responsible for this carnage. We should be asking these same companies to pay for the damage they are inflicting on society. Yeah, send them a bill. It must be so hard. How do you pick up if you're retired? How do you pick up from this and start again? Where do these people find money to keep going? Our child has lots of questions and knows that these events prevent him from kindergarten and daycare and seeing loved ones at times. Interestingly, it's not affected his sleep or anything, as he just accepts these disasters as normal. Did you feel this one? Yeah, I mean I think of my little boy explaining it to young children, who shouldn't have to deal with these things but will be on the forefront and this is all they'll ever know. This is normal to him. We need a massive shift from the government who continues to subsidise fossil fuels. We need a massive increase in funding for mental health services. We need to engage with, fund and support First Nations people to help them heal country and to listen and follow the scientific community's advice urgently. What gives me hope is the mobilisation of youth. The community's support in the aftermath of these unnatural disasters. I think that community spirit is so important and what we need to back that up with is government resources and funding. We need to do so much and there is no more time to waste. Every action matters and we need it all immediately. Yeah, so true. Alright, if we had set a little bit of context of the intensity and the reality of what climate change is and perhaps the most dramatic emotion or feeling that I think the reality of climate change generates in all of us is the idea of anxiety, right? One of the things that I think is really interesting is this quote. This quote really caught my attention because I think it sums up very well the threat that we're talking about, right? We are people of the sea ice. If there's no more sea ice, how can we be people of the sea ice? A member of the Inuit community in Canada. I mean, just for a moment, just think about that. What does it mean when a person says that everything they know, their sense of identity, their sense of meaning in life no longer exists? What type of anxiety, what type of emotions are generated from a situation where you no longer can have an identity or identify what is meaningful to you because of something like climate change? And this is a reality for a lot of people that started years ago. It's continuing to decimate communities and will be a real issue in the future. I'm sure you guys have, or I assume you guys have seen a number of the reports that come out all the time. All these councils talking about, hey, we have to do a lot to slow down the warming. And if we get past, I think the concern is if we reach the 1.5 degrees Celsius, then we're going to really be looking at some problems. But if we get to 2 degrees Celsius, then that's when we're going to start to see some real cataclysmic changes in world economies. And that's something that we're like 20 years away from. And we're not talking just places, remote places that we're not familiar with. We're talking about places like Maryland and New York and Miami. Places that we're very familiar with. The fundamental change in existence and what that means. But before we get into more of that, let's talk about this from an existential standpoint. Fun fact. Who is familiar with the Jacob Schwan? Anybody? The Jacob Schwan. The Jacob Schwan. Anybody heard of that? That is the fastest and one of the largest moving glaciers in the west of Greenland. And it's a huge glacier that's been kind of moving around. And, you know, what's interesting about the Jacob Schwan Glacier, which started, I think, detached in 2012 and still kind of moving about. You would think that you would see this huge glacier moving about and it would cause concern. But it's become an actual tourist attraction. That's the reaction, that it's become a tourist attraction. I just thought that was kind of apropos of what the situation is in terms of how we view climate change. Another fun fact. What is the difference between Antarctica and the Arctic? In terms of the name. Anybody? Well, a tribe said that the Arctic and Antarctica, the only difference is Arctic, and I forgot the language, means four-legged beast or animal. And so in the Arctic, you had these beasts, so you called it the Arctic. And in Antarctica, you didn't have it. Arctic has these four-legged beasts, and in Antarctica, you did not. That's where the name comes from, Antarctica and the Arctic. I like these little fun Jeopardy type of things. All right. Let's get into some more stuff here. So let's talk about existentialism, all right? Let's put this in context. How many of you are familiar with existentialism, have heard of it before or what have you? Anybody? Okay. Anybody want to give me a little bit of what they think existentialism is? Yes. Let's see. We have all these sort of human conditions characterized by lack of inherent meaning. We have to create meaning. We're all going to die. We can't do anything about that. We're faced with the inevitable obligation to make choices and to live with the consequences of those choices. Geez, he might as well do this presentation. Excellent. Isolation. Basically the forgiveness. Yes. Yeah. Well, it sums it up nicely. The only thing I would say, and this is where we have to be careful about existentialism. The way you described it, which is true, leads people to feel like it's very morbid and sad. There's a flip side to each of those. Exactly. Exactly. We can overcome our isolation. We're going to die, but life is miraculous. Exactly. There's a flip side to all of it. As long as we can kind of figure out, remain in that space of balance, existentialism is not a morbid notion at all. It's a doctrine of human existence that really asks the question, we are here, right? Because you think about it, we have a lot of sciences that talk about trying to figure out the origin of man, right? Astrophysics and the singularity and all this chemicals and minerals and everything and the Big Bang Theory and how we've evolved and everything else to try to figure out the origin of man. We have the biblical references and everything else. In existentialism, it's like, okay, those things are interesting in terms of trying to figure out the origin of existence or what it means to be human. But more importantly, what we're focused on is now that we're here, because we can debate how we got here or we want, now that we're here, what are we going to do about it? And that goes into all those things that you talked about, right? Now that we're here, how do we make the most out of this existence, right? So that's what existentialism is focused on. It's this doctrine of human existence that focuses on how do we make the most out of our given existence here? So, I guess you've already answered this question, but what is existentialism? It is, first and foremost, philosophical, right? And philosophy is rather important. It's not necessarily a science, but everything that we sort of, in terms of the sciences, in terms of the social sciences, most of the origin of social sciences comes from what? Philosophy, right? The idea of psychology came from philosophy, right? The thought and study in these deep conversations about how the mind works, right? It is concerned with the understanding of people's position in the world and with the clarification of what it means to them to be alive. What does it mean to be alive, right? And, as you stated, existentialism emphasizes action, freedom, and the decision-making as fundamental to human existence, right? That we are accountable and responsible for our own sense of happiness, our own sense of meaning in this world. And, you know, if we start to talk about folks like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, these existential philosophers, they were a bit not liked in their day, but they had some very strong opinions about human existence. And Friedrich Nietzsche was known for saying that God was dead and that life was meaningless. But the bigger point he was making was that, it was metaphorical, what he was really saying was that life continues to happen whether you like it or not, whether you are engaged or not. So you can cry about it or you can do something about it, right? It is incumbent upon you to make meaning, right? And Kierkegaard's point was most people are too afraid to find their own meaning. Most people want to go along with the group because they fear what? Isolation and ostracization. And that is one of the worst things we can do as individuals because it takes away our individual humanity and our uniqueness. So you have to have the courage to stand out, right? Courage, you know, from the Latin word core, which basically means heart, right? You have to have the heart, the courage to be your unique individual because in existentialism there is only one you, one me. There will only ever be one you, one me. So we understand that we are all unique individuals, right? And we have that responsibility to make the most of our uniqueness. So that's a little bit about the uniqueness of existentialism as a doctrine of human existence. Some principles of existentialism. One was, this is a famous quote by Jean-Paul Sartre, probably the foremost famous existentialist, although he would hate to be called an existentialist. But Jean-Paul Sartre and his girlfriend, Beauvoir, he talked about this idea of existence that takes precedence over essence, right? Existence that precedes essence. And what he was saying was that existence means to emerge or to become, and essence implies a static and immutable substance. So in other words, your essence is you're born here and you're here. And you're human and you're among your culture and your people and that's fine. But what do you make out of your essence, right? What do you choose to become for yourself? And that was the part that most people, he said, did not take on the reins to do. They did not focus on their existence. Because existence is something that says, it's a continual growth process, right? Existence is just a process. And essence refers to a product. You know, who you are, your last name, where you come from. But that in some ways can define you, but ultimately you must, what, define yourself, right? And that's what we mean by the existence. Existence is associated with growth and change, and essence signifies stagnation and finality. So in a practical way, you can say, so the guy who grows up with a rich family legacy, and he's expected to take over the family, and so that's just what he knows to do. It's kind of an essence, right? His future is already determined and he just goes along with it. But what does he want to do, right? Does he actually want to take over the family business? Does he want to do something that really defines himself, right? What will be his existence in that space, as a practical example, right? Second, existentialism opposes the split between subject and object. People are both subject and objective, subjective and objective, and must search for truth by living active and authentic lives. Now that's a really interesting proposition because if we put it in a research space, this is what we call living action research, right? I remember reading an article about the—there was a paper post-World War II called Le Monde in Paris. It was a really popular paper, and existentialism was all the way post-World War II, right? Because it just survived the German uprise, the Third Reich, and everything else, and a lot of people were sort of—they were sort of in awe about all that happened. They had questions about their own existence, about God, about religion, wondering how could God allow all these terrible things to happen. And so they started to believe that meaning had to come from within rather than relying on things that were outside of them. So this is why existentialism became very popular in post-World War II. And so there was this paper called Le Monde, and the difficulty was, how do you define existentialism at the time? We had these writers who were talking about it, but what does it mean? And so one of the famous journalists who interviewed a number of the so-called existentialists at the time, he wrote a front-page article that finally talked about what existentialism was, and ultimately what he said was, existentialism is not something to be studied, it is something to be lived. And that's the best way to describe existentialism, the idea of you must engage in life, you can't study it from afar, right? So I think that's what we mean by a little bit about this idea of people are both subjective and objective. We can understand and learn from their experiences, right? But we also have to engage in life as well. Third, people search for some meaning to their lives. Now for me, in terms of my practice and everything else, well, not everything else, but particularly my practice, my private practice, a lot of times, the biggest issue that I find most consistently is that a lot of people suffer from all types of mental issues and emotional challenges because they ultimately lack meaning in their lives. They ultimately lack purpose. So it creates the anxiety, it creates the depression, it creates all those DSM diagnoses, right? Because they lack purpose and meaning. And so this is where existentialism really gets into the realm of psychotherapy, is when we talk about, well, how do we merge this idea of psychology and existentialism, a philosophical doctrine, is this idea of how do we help people find meaning in their existence, right? Because the more you find meaning, the higher the probability you will have good mental health. Fourth, existentialists hold that ultimately each of us is responsible for who we are and what we become. So we kind of talked about that. But I think one of the things that's missing from that is this idea of responsibility and accountability, and existentialism has kind of a symbiotic relationship. In other words, what it means is you are responsible ultimately for yourself, but you also are accountable not only to yourself, but to who? Each other, your fellow man. You have to make decisions that don't hurt your fellow man, but ultimately help them. Sometimes that's a difficult proposition. But in existentialism, it's not about only personal responsibility, it's about accountability. Because no matter how you slice it, when we look at who we are as individuals, you always have two identities, right? Always. You can never get away from that. So, for example, if I were to go around the room and ask you, what's your last name? You would tell me, right? Hopefully you would know, obviously, right? And then I would say, well, what's your favorite sports team, right? What's your favorite food? And ultimately, all of you are here at this conference, so most of you are in the medical field or psychology field or what have you. So that means that there's all those things so that you have, what, a group identity, correct, right, that you're part of a group. But also, most of you probably don't even, in this room right now, probably don't even know each other, but you're unique individuals, right? So we always must understand that we are part of two things. We are our individual unique identity, we're always going to be part of a group identity. So as you say, I have this last name, you got this from your mom, your dad, you're part of a group. And sometimes, I think, in the Western view, we focus too much on our individuality. And it's kind of an oxymoron, it's kind of a paradox, if you will, because 70% of the world really operate on a collectivist identity, right? It's only in the West where we really talk about this rugged individualism, which is not really true. I mean, we have children, we have families, we have communities, it's a collectivist idea. So that is the reality, we are one part unique and individual, and then we're another part group, and that's just who each of us are, right? So we must be accountable to, responsible for our own actions and accountable for our fellow man, if you will. And fifth, existentialists are basically anti-theoretical, I 90% agree with that. To them, theories further dehumanize people and render them as objects. I think that we do need to theorize, we do need research, and we do need science. But as an existentialist, I do get this notion that we can't get lost in that and forget that when we start turning individuals into names, I mean, to numbers or sample one, sample two, and that sort of thing, that's where it gets to become, that's when we're starting to dehumanize folks. And that becomes a problem because once we take away your name and don't identify you by your name or your background or who you are, it's so much easier to not treat you as what? As a person, right? This is what Blum and Martin Buber and what other philosopher can I think of, Blum, Immanuel Kant all talked about in this notion of never treat a person, always treat a person as what? As an end of itself. Not a means to an end, but an end of itself. Because when you treat people as an end of the self, you're honoring their what? Their humanity. But a lot of times what we have in our society is what? We have this idea that we treat people as a means to an end. Imagine a person who has a big corporation, who hires all these people, they get in over their head, and they have to cut 2, 3, 4, 5,000 jobs. These are their assets, right? Because they're helping your business, but now you have to fire them because your business will go under. So what do you do? Do you think of them as people who have jobs and lives and families and you try to work something out? Or do you just say, well, no, we'll just cut these 5,000 jobs because I need to keep my business going or what have you, right? Sometimes those are difficult decisions, but the question is how do you think of it? Do you think of people as a means or do you think of them as an end? Oftentimes I think the problem is we think of people as a means to an end rather than an end of itself. And that can be very, very dangerous, right? Again, the four givens of existence from the existential point of view is isolation, meaning, freedom, and death. These are the four things that sort of, these are the four pillars of existence that we talk about in existentialism, right? We are inherently interpersonal beings, correct? As soon as we come into the world, we need what? We need somebody. There's no getting around it. If you come into the world and are left alone, what happens? You die. There are animals who, there are certain species of animals, as soon as they're born, they're like, I got it from here. We good. I'll let you later, right? There are certain animals like that. But humans... Say again? Humans are one of those animals. That definitely need others, right? Yeah, absolutely. So we are designed to be connected to others, right? And so given that, it goes into this first principle of isolation that we fear isolation, right? We fear ostracization. And many people will go to many lengths to what? To stay clear of isolation. I mean, when we think about it from a statistical, normal bell curve, you know, there are outliers where people are hermits and don't want to stay off the grid and don't want to be bothered, right? But for the most part, we are what? We are inherently interpersonal beings, right? And we fear isolation, and some people will go to extremes just to remain included. For example, the philosopher, what was his name? He wrote Being in Time. Benzwanger? Is it Benzwanger? Is it Benzwanger? No, no. I'm sorry. He wrote Being in Time. Heidegger. Heidegger. Thank you. Heidegger. Now, I don't know about if you know anything about Heidegger. He wrote some interesting stuff, talking about histochorality and all this other stuff and meaning only exists relative to the context and all this interesting stuff. But Heidegger was a jerk. And he feared, this is an example of isolation. Because he came up during the Third Reich, Hitler's power or whatever, and here's this deeply philosophical, thoughtful person, but because he feared what was going on, he joined the Third Reich. And not only did he join the Third Reich, he was intimately responsible for the deaths of thousands and thousands of Jews. I mean, even helping design ways to kill them, gas chamber and all this stuff, Heidegger. So it's like we have to separate the man from his work, but the reality of it is that because of fear of isolation, being ostracized, of being one of those, he joined the Third Reich. That's the power of wanting to be a part of something. We talked about meaning, this idea of freedom, is that we are inherently free, perhaps, maybe, because we have conscience and because we can make decisions. I don't know if you put that in context, sometimes we can debate that point about what it means to be free in a society, especially when we look at historical movements like the apartheid and stuff like that. What does it mean to be free, right? Ultimately, what it means to be free, and some people argue with me about how unfair this is, but we always have a freedom to choose, right? Always, in any circumstance, we always have a freedom to choose, even if the circumstances are the worst circumstances and they're not fair. For example, when you think about, what's the, logotherapy, who's logotherapy? Franco, right? He was brought into the Auschwitz camps, right? He was a doctor, and he was respected, and for some reason, his whole family was brought, they were killed. For some odd reason, he kept surviving, but the idea for logotherapy came out of this experience in Auschwitz, where some German soldiers noticed that he had an ability to calm people down, and every morning, he would wake up and he would watch all these trucks come in filled with Jewish folks come in and be brought to these camps, and their families would be torn apart, and he'd see people crying and getting beat up and everything else, and he would talk to them, and so the German soldier says, you know what? You have an ability here, so this is what we're going to do. We're going to make you the welcome committee. We're going to, when we bring in the Jews, you will console them, you will talk to them, you will make them feel comfortable, and prepare them for what? Inevitable. And he had to choose, it's a hell of a choice, isn't it, right? He had to choose whether he was going to say, no, I won't do that, that's ridiculous, and then clearly, you know what would happen if he refused, right, but he made the choice to find meaning in giving those people a little bit of consolation, a little bit of comfort before the inevitable faith, and luckily, he survived, but hell of a choice, hell of a circumstance, but still in that circumstance, he made choices. Same thing with Elie Wiesel, his experience, right? Same thing with many of the Africans who came from Sierra Leone and other places who decided, hey, look, when they went to Guri Island, the place where a lot of Africans were brought to in hell before they went across the transatlantic, a lot of them made the choice to drown themselves, to jump off ships, because they knew what their fate was, but that was the power of their choice, that was the freedom in their choice. Circumstances suck, but we all, the lesson is, we all have the power, the freedom of choice. So that's another aspect of existentialism, sorry to get so morbid on you, but I'm just illustrating the power of choice. And finally, death, death is the great equalizer, it should be humbling to all of us that death is the great equalizer, and that we can't get away from this idea of death. It comes for us all, and it connects us in ways where we understand that we have a finite time on this earth, and the question for existentialists is, I don't know what's going on in the afterlife, I don't know. I mean, we have all these various religions that say, this is what happens, reincarnation, heaven, okay, fine, I'm not gonna argue with you on that. But what are you gonna do with what's given to you now? That's what you wanna focus on for now, we'll figure out the other stuff later, because we don't know what the other stuff is, but what we do know is that you have a life now, so what do you make of it? This is what we mean by the idea of creating meaning for yourself now, right? Because death is the great equalizer, and it gives us a finite time frame to do the most we can in this life. All right, now, when we talk about existence, what time, let me check the time, because I can talk a lot, okay, so when we talk about existentialism, and we talk about existence, a guy by the name of Kierkegaard, who people could argue was one of the first individuals who really kind of combined the philosophy of existentialism with psychotherapy, he was a doctor, a medical doctor, and psychiatry, kind of, you know, and he said, well, we need to understand how people exist, and what he came up with was that, he said, people live in these four, well, three overlapping domains, right? The first was called the eigenveld, I love saying that, right? The first was the eigenveld, and the eigenveld was this personal world that we have, our conscious, the world that no one can have access to unless we actually let them in, right, where we house our values, our virtues, and what have you, so this is the eigenveld, our personal world, and then we have the umveld, and the umveld was this world where we live with nature, right, how we interact with nature and the world around us, right? And then we had the mitveld, and the mitveld was our interpersonal world, how we react, how we connected with others, right? I would probably take it a step further and say that the mitveld is not only how we interacted with others in terms of people, but how we interacted with other, what, organic life, right? Animals, and what have you, right, just life in general, how we interacted with life. So nature, your interactions with life and others, right, and then our personal world, the eigenveld. And then finally, because there was a philosopher who came many years after named Emily Van Drusen Smith, I believe, she's still alive actually, but she read Kierkegaard's work and was like, well, people have a spiritual world too, so we're, it would be remiss not to mention the spiritual world, and she said that there should be an uberwelt, right, and this uber in German means over, so there should be this uberwelt. And so the four overlapping domains of existence, right, that's now been sort of accepted is the eigenwelt, the umwelt, the mitwelt, and Emily Van Drusen's uberwelt. Now, I mean, side note is when you think about Emily Van Drusen's contribution to the three domains of existence, she said that the uberwelt, the spiritual world was lacking in Kierkegaard's model, and so we needed this uberwelt. But if you really read Kierkegaard's work closely, what you'll come to understand is that he didn't forget the spiritual world, he just had a different perspective. His perspective was more Eastern, hers was more Western. In the West, we separate our individual world from the spiritual world, we separate it. In the East, the spiritual world is intimately connected with what? The umwelt, right, and the mitwelt, right? It's connected with nature and lands, right? So in Kierkegaard's work, if you read deeply enough, you understand that he did not miss it, it's just that if you have a different perspective, you would have missed it, and I think that's what Van Drusen missed, but he did account for the spiritual world. But places like Asia, places like Africa, the ancestors, the spiritual world is all around you every day and everything, right? It's not separate, if you will, but that's just a side note. Anyway, so the emphasis that we need to think about as it relates to climate change is the umwelt, right? Our relationship to nature, right? Our relationship to nature. Now, when we think about climate change and what contributes to climate change, right, we think about the five main things that really contribute to climate change. Transportation, industry, commercial and residential emissions, agriculture, which surprisingly is a really big contributor to climate change, I mean, probably one of, probably the biggest almost, right? And electricity generation and heat production, right? All these things contribute to global warming. And I think that the thing that's important to point out is that when I think about climate change or man-made climate change, it gets into what I just talked about before in terms of the difference between how Van Drusen or Emily saw the umwelt needing to be added to Kierkegaard's Three Worlds of Existence and missing the idea that the spirituality was connected to nature, right? But that's very telling because her perspective was a Western perspective and Kierkegaard's, he pulled from a lot of Eastern perspectives. That's why he included the spirituality within the umwelt, nature. But this carries over now into climate change and the view of climate change. Why? The reason why we have a climate change problem is because the world, the advanced world has adopted a Western view of nature. And that Western view of nature typically is how do we conquer nature? How do we beat nature, right? And the Eastern view of nature is what? How do we harmonize, right? How do we have a relationship with nature? It's interesting, but I really took a re-watch, who's seen the movie Avatar, right? I haven't seen the new one, but you've seen the original. I got to see the new one, but I heard it's really good. They got a part three coming out and a part four and all this other stuff, a lot of movies. But in terms of the message, if you really pay attention, it is really talking about this difference, it's showing, it's highlighting the difference between a Western view of how we look at nature and an Eastern view of how we look at nature. One is how do we conquer nature and how do we harmonize and get along with nature? And the question we have to ask ourselves when it comes to climate change is the Western view of how do we conquer nature, has that led us to where we are now in terms of climate change? Absolutely. Because the reality of it is we have to respect nature or it will not respect us, right? And that's where we're inevitably headed. And so the question becomes in terms of what do we do, how do we create a mentality in individuals that allows us to say, let's stop trying to conquer nature, right? And how do we learn how to, what, harmonize and have a relationship with nature? Because that's the only way we'll be able to really make a dent into climate change. That mentality has to shift, right? Because the thing that's concerning to me is, and I think I'm going a little bit ahead, but that's okay. The thing that really gets, bothers me is that when I think about the solutions to climate change that have been offered for the most part, they still have a Western underlying mentality. It's more technology. That's the thing. A Western view is how do we create new methods and strategies and technologies to help curb climate change? That's what got us in this in the first place. This idea of not respecting nature, but creating, thinking that at some point, some smart group of folks in a lab is going to come up with some technology that's going to allow us to stave off the effects of climate change. That's not the right mentality. That can help because at this point, we're probably going to need some type of technology to help us, but we have to shift the mentality from that Western view to the more Eastern view. We have to learn how to respect and harmonize with nature rather than trying to conquer it. This goes as far as back as when we think about even the Western King James Version Bible. When we think about Genesis and everything else, it says in the book of Genesis, it says God created the heaven and earth. He created the fowl. He created, you guys remember this story, right? Yes? In there, as he starts to break down how he created the earth, he said, then he created man and then he said what? He gave man what? Dominion over everything, right? Over nature, over animals, over ... It's like, that's a very Westernized view of looking at the creation of the world, right? Look where that view has led us. Is it right to say that we should have dominion over nature and animals, or should we have a relationship, a respectful relationship with nature and animals, not dominion over, because look where it's got us. Anyway, so in the existential view of climate change, right? Yes? Oh absolutely, of course. Absolutely, I totally agree with that. You can, sure. All humans, including Europeans, had this, at one time, had this connection. Yeah. Loving, co-operative relationship. Yeah. And so, you know, this is why, you know, you got to be careful here when you speak of this, because it's like, I'm speaking in terms of trying to get through it, you know, in terms of Western Eastern, but, you know, that's why I wouldn't say, I won't say European versus African or whatever, it's just Western versus Eastern, just to keep it kind of general, but your points are very well taken into account, but just for, to get through the presentation. I just bifurcated it to Western and Eastern. But then we get into this idea of existential guilt, right? And so, what we're really talking about here is the unwell guilt, right? Unwell guilt, our relationship to nature, and the guilt that comes from knowing we can do better, like Maya Angelou says, when you know better, you... Maya Angelou, when you know better, you... There you go, right. When you know better, you do better, right? And, well, supposedly, right? But, you know, the thing, the psychological component that's missing in that is, when you know better, you have to have the courage to do better, and that's what's missing from that idea, right? But the unwell form of guilt comes from a lack of awareness of one's existence in the world, which Rollo made, for example, believed to take place when the world becomes more technologically advanced, and people are less concerned about nature, and become removed from nature, right? This idea of the unwell guilt, right? Hoffman, 2008, he stated that the environment or ecological responsibility is a primary source of existential guilt. Knowing that when we put all our water bottles in the regular trash can, we don't compost, right? Or that when we get into our fancy Corvettes and everything else, and go to the gas station and everything else, we've heard enough to know that these things are contributing to the environment, and all of us are guilty. I'm guilty as well, right? But there's a sense of, remember, we talked about in existentialism, this idea of responsibility and accountability, right, to your fellow man. Not only to your fellow man, but what? To nature, right? To the world around you. But all of us have that role, and all of us deal in some way, or maybe we don't, maybe we sort of are in denial a little bit about what? This unwell guilt, right? This idea that we do know better, right? We do know that buying plastic bottles and having petroleum fuel vehicles and all this other stuff, but we still do it, right? Because out of the what? Out of the convenience that it gives us, right? But it doesn't mean that we don't know better, right? We still buy all these fancy clothes knowing that they're made from sweatshops in China and what have you. We know, we kind of know, but we still do it anyway. This is this idea of guilt, the unwell guilt that we're talking about, right? And some of us, I guess as we get older and wiser, it becomes something that helps us, motivates us to do better. And for others, we continue to live in a denial because the convenience of everything around us is so convenient. And so we continue to live in that world of convenience knowing that we have that guilt. And the reality from an existential standpoint is to be really authentic is we need to embrace that guilt to allow us and motivate us to make better decisions, right? This is why the last point is, however, it is not always seen as a negative. In fact, when identified, when your unwell guilt is identified, faced, and creatively used, guilt can be positive, constructive, and lead to positive outcomes and changes. Let the guilt motivate you to do better, right? To turn in the big Tahoe truck for, well, I'm not going to say Prius or Tesla, whatever, whatever EV you want to get, I don't know, right? But these are small things that we can do as individuals. And the reality that we have to understand is that we can't massage our guilt by saying somebody in some lab is going to come up with some form of technology that's going to stave off climate change and the warming of our planet, right? So what time is it? I got to 930, right? Oh, boy. All right. Got some time, right? So what is, why is it so important to, why is meaning so important to existence? What helps us determine what is meaningful, right? Remember, the core of existentialism is this idea of meaning, right? And so the reason why I want to emphasize this point is how does this relate to climate change, this idea of meaning? Because if I was to go around the room and ask what is meaningful for you, you're going to, I'm going to hear some commonplace answers. Family, correct? Career, correct? Right? Your partner, right? Maybe some personal work that you're doing, a book or article, that sort of thing, right? Rearing your children, right? You know, these are some common things that we find very meaningful. Maybe it's your family history that's really meaningful for you, something that your great grandfather, grandfather, grandmother, or whatever, either side, did that's meaningful for you, right? Some work, some innovative piece of technology that you helped create. All these things are meaningful for you, right? You know, things that, certain values that you hold dear, trust and love and what have you, these things are all meaningful for you, right? So what does that all have to do, excuse me, with climate change? Well, let's get to that question. I think it's really important. All the things that I talked about and how you create meaning for yourselves is based out of your experience in what? Your what? Or culture, more broadly speaking. It's the culture you grew up in, right, that teaches you what's meaningful for you, right? The culture that you grew up in in your household, right, and then in your community, and then as you branch out into the world, right? Culture implies a worldview, a set of values, and a network of relationships. Culture creates a worldview that underpins a set of identities and people that reflect complex ancestral origins, tribal or community associations, and very ideological outlooks on common themes of existence, including life, death, love, connection, meaning, freedom, and responsibility. We all get our views of those things from the culture that we grew up in, right? And in this way, culture is like a river. It has many sources. But how do we better understand culture? Because guess what? In the social sciences, this is, to me, it's a pretty good definition of culture, right? I kind of massaged it a little bit. But in the social sciences, this is still a social debate. How do you properly define culture? How do you properly operationalize culture within the research paradigm to make it be effectuous, right? It's very difficult. People just can't seem to have a consensus on, this is how you define culture, right? We can just sort of talk around it, if you will, right? But we know what the implications are for culture. It gives us our sense of what? Of meaning, of value, of identity, right? We know the significance of what culture is all about. Again, so what does that have to do with climate change, right? What does that have to do with climate change? So, this is the existential model of cross-cultural, existential model of culture. Now, this model I created with my mentor who passed away in 2021, Dr. Clement Von Tress, who's considered the father of cross-culturalism in the United States. He passed away in April of 2021. And he was, that's where I learned about existentialism from him. So, we created this model called the existential model of culture. And so, let me tell you a little bit about what this is. So, Kierkegaard talks about, we live in these sort of three overlapping domains, the mitwelt, the eigenwelt, the umwelt, right? But more broadly speaking, you know, in terms of what influences us, right? If you look at the funnel at the top, these are all what we call the various cultural tributaries, the universal, the historical, the ecological, geographical, national, regional, socioeconomic, and race, and ethnicity, right? And below, right, is sort of, I'm sure you guys heard of the Maslow hierarchy needs, right? Those common needs, security, safety, love, belonging, what else? Self-actualization, which is also a cross-cultural issue, but I won't talk about that. In his expanded model, he talked about the love for art and curiosity as well. So, he actually had seven tiers, right? But those things are relevant to most individuals, you know, the feeling of security and safety, what have you, right? But when we focus on the top portion, right, in terms of culture and what we glean from culture, the universal, for example, the first cultural tributary, which is the broadest, is this idea of what is common amongst all people, right? The universal culture. What is common amongst all of us? And we talked about that a little bit. We talked about what? We talked about love, connection, you know, values, right? Freedom, choice, all these things, right? Responsibility, accountability. No matter what culture you come from, as a human, right, these things apply to you, and you learn how to value those things within your what? Within your cultural context, right? So, this is the universal culture, right? This is part of what you decide gives you meaning in that space, right? And then if we go down to the historical, historical means the historical legacy that you come from. Many people gather meaning from what? Who they are, who their family is, right? You know, in Eastern cultures, right, the historical is very important because the past lives with them in the present. The ancestors helped them make decisions in the present for the future, right? So, depending on the culture you come out of, the historical cultural tributary is very important in terms of giving you a sense of what? Identity, a sense of legacy, right, a sense of time orientation. You know, in the West, the way we look at time orientation is we tend to be present and future oriented. We don't really look at the past too much. We care about the past. This is why reparations is such a difficult conversation and stuff like that, right? But in a lot of Eastern cultures, you know, and indigenous cultures, the past is always with them. The grandmother or mother who passed away is still to this day. She's with me right now, right? And that gives us a sense of meaning in our identity. So, that's the historical culture tributary. Then we talk about the ecological and geographical. Where we grow up geographically matters, whether it's rural or urban, hot or cold. A person who grows up in Alaska and Greenland has a very different perspective than someone who grows up in urban Miami, right? A person who grows up in Chicago, in the Midwest of Chicago, right, has a very different perspective on life than a person who grows up in Wyoming, right? So, what is the value, what is the importance that a person places on the ecological or the geographical based on where they live? This gives them a sense of identity and meaning, right? Then we look at the national, which gets into a whole bunch of other things. Like, for example, you know, the national influences the religion, the language, right? The sports teams you like, the government, the politics, right? With the Democrat, Republican, Independent, what have you. But these things give us a sense of what? Who we are, how we identify, what makes us who we are. I'm a proud conservative, I'm a left-leaning Democrat. I'm just saying, I'm not saying what I am, I'm just, right? But for people, right, it gives them a sense of who they are. It gives them a sense of identity. It gives them a sense of what? Meaning, right? The regional, the regional, we gave you more specific. I grew up in Chicago, and I can promise you that when you think about Chicago, the South Side is so different from the North Side. And the North Side is so different from the West Side. And the West Side is so different from the East Side. Oh my God, really different. I mean, this is why if you're on the South Side, you're a White Sox fan. If you're on the North Side, you're what? Cubs fan. And if you are on the North Side and you say you're a White Sox fan, you will get looked at crazy. That's just a reality, right? But it's meaningful, right? In these regions, there are different idioms in terms of food, in terms of style of clothe, even in terms of dialect, right? There are things that we say on the South Side of Chicago that people wouldn't say on the North Side of Chicago. There is about how we navigate life within the regional cultural context. This is what, is his name Jerome Bruner? Talks about when he refers to folk psychology, right? This idea of psychology that allows us to navigate the community that we're in. It may not make sense in a broader landscape, but within this context, it makes sense. Like, you know, back in the day when kids who grew up in the South, and if they get on the phone and watch TV and it starts raining really hard, what does grandma say? This is like way back in the day. Like, she says, oh, they're probably still saying that. If it rains in the South, and you're watching TV or you're on the phone, they all say, get off the phone, turn off the television, right? For some fear that, I don't know, electrical power outage. I don't know, but this is a very common folk psychology in the South growing up way back when, you know, 50, 60 years ago, right? And, you know, my wife, she's from Louisiana, and she said growing up that sometimes her grandmother told her, that as well, right? But that's an ism that made sense there, probably didn't make sense generally speaking, but it gave them a folk psychology within that context, right? We all have a folk psychology wherever region we come into, and it gives us a sense of what? Meaning, it gives us ability to navigate that community, that part of our world, right? That allows us to navigate that world. So that's what we call the regional cultural tributary. Then the socioeconomic. Regional cultural tributary. Then the socioeconomic, which is what? Really important because there's a tendency where if you grew up middle class, poor, or rich, you have probably a different view of the world, don't you? Right? Certain things that you value, if you're poor, you may not value if you grew up rich. And certain things that you may value if you grew up middle class, you may not value if you grew up poor. It's a different view. There's a tendency, right? But the thing that's really important is the cultural capital that comes, the capital that comes within growing up either rich, poor, or middle class. That is the cultural capital, the social capital, economic capital. Economic capital, the resources, right? The access to money and assets that allows you to have a better life, that allows for the possibility of social upward mobility, right? Then there's your economic, your social capital. Whereas, what is the network, right? What's the network that you have? If I'm a kid who grows up in a poor community and I go to a career fair at my school and a doctor comes there and says, hey, he presents on being a doctor and this kid from a poor neighborhood says, I wanna be a doctor. I can't wait to become a doctor, right? But they grew up in a poor neighborhood and another kid who's probably in a middle class neighborhood, he goes to that same career fair and he's inspired by that doctor as well. The difference in terms of social capital is the poor kid may not have anybody in his family that can connect them with what? A doctor, so they can just have a conversation. But the kid who grows up in the middle class family who tells his mom, I wanna become a doctor, there was a guy who was a great neurosurgeon and it inspired me and she may say, you know what, well, your uncle is a doctor. I can, we'll make a call and I can send you down and you can go to his office and he can tell you what it means to be a doctor and what it means to go to medical school. That's social capital, that's very powerful, right? And depending on where you grow, how you grow up socioeconomically will give you access to that type of social capital or that cultural capital, cultural capital. What does that mean? That means when I grew up in Chicago, on the South Side, we grew up middle to lower class but I can tell you, I don't remember going to too many ballets or plays or, you know, being exposed to wine and what the hell did nautical mean? I don't know shit, right? I just didn't have that cultural capital but when I started to branch out and do things and get exposed, now I love Broadway. I love Broadway, oh my God, are you kidding, right? But how many kids are not exposed to that type of cultural capital, right? I can tell you, I can taste the wine and tell you what region it's from, well, probably not anymore but I used to be all into wines and all types of stuff right there but the cultural capital, I love classical music and I can tell you some different artists and all this other stuff, cultural capital and depending on how you grew up, where you grew up, that would dictate the type of access to cultural, social and economic capital you have. That makes a difference in terms of who you become, what you value, what gives you a sense of meaning, right? And finally, racial ethnic, right? When I grew up in the South Side of Chicago, very racially homogenous, all black folks, that's where I grew up, you know? Luckily, by the time I got to high school, I went to a private high school in Chicago so that became my first experience dealing with folks that were not black, you know? And it was an experience for me. I was like, wow, like, I'm around white folks. This is crazy, right? And it was cool, one of my best friends, Pat Hughes, I remember Pat Hughes, became one of my best friends and he was white and we had all these conversations about what it means to be black and white and everything else but it was a fascinating experience. But it means something, right? Where you grew up and the type of diversity that you are exposed to or not exposed to gives you a sense of what you come to value, what becomes meaningful for you, right? And so we know that the better off you are with the more diversity you have, it gives you a broader worldview, allows you to appreciate people as an end more so than it means, depending on how much of diversity you had growing up. So that's what we mean by the racial ethnic cultural tributary and all these combined, right, influence your identity and who you are, right? So this is the existential model of culture. Now, I broke all that down to say, well, what does this have to do with climate change? Well, if all these things give us a sense of who we are, right, give us a sense of who we are, we have to assume some things. One is there's a sense of consistency in this expectation of this existential model of culture. It means you have a set of consistent and new experiences, right, that what Edward Typere, the sociologist from Chicago suggested that in culture, it's not only about what you're exposed to, it's what you extrapolate from those experiences, right? That make you who you are, that helps you become who you are in terms of your identity, right? What you extrapolate from those experiences. So it gives you that sense of active individuality. And so in terms of climate change, right, the reality of it is that, I'm gonna skip that because it's not needed, is how does climate change disrupt that sense of identity through the existential model of culture? How does it disrupt that? Now, climate change, I'm just, like it's 9.02 and I'm just getting to climate change. I gotta hurry it up, my apologies. Climate change, now keep in mind the existential model of culture, okay? Now, climate change, I think we're here because we understand the basics of climate change. Climate change is essentially the warming of our entire planet due to human-caused events and activities, greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, waste generation, and population exposure, right? And if humans do nothing to slow down climate change, then the global temperature may increase. And this is because climate change scenarios are broken down into three categories, right? And so the worst case scenario is, if we don't do nothing, the world's gonna warm up by four degrees and that is an extinction level event, right? By the year 2100. Earth has not been that warm for millions of years. And when it did, we know what happened. So that's kind of what we're talking about. It's essentially the warming of our planet and the devastation that's gonna cause because we won't be able to live in such an environment. And again, what's our response? Let's colonize Mars. I don't get it, I don't get it, all right? So in recent years, not only climate scientists, but also major world leaders, including the US Secretary of Defense, major American presidential candidates, and the United Nations Secretary General have labeled climate change as a what? Existential threat, right? But what does existential threat really mean? It means that they're to our very what? Existence, right? I mean, existentialism, if you break down the word, the first part is exist, right? It just means to exist, right? How do we exist, right? So the term existential refers to the big questions about meaning, the meaning of life or humanity's place in the cosmos. It means that climate change is an existential threat to a host of human cultures, traditions, and languages, to everything we know. Remember that existential model of culture? Climate change is a threat to all that I just explained, all that I explained. It changes that dynamic. Everything that you've come to know through that existential model of culture that makes you who you are, this very moment is subject to being destroyed, to being changed forever. That is the reason why climate change is an existential issue, right? It gets at the very core of changing how we fundamentally define what is meaningful for us, right? Just a couple of scary facts. You know, why does climate change matter? Stern et al. reported that climate change could cause an additional 40 to 160,000 children's deaths per year in the South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa through gross domestic product losses alone under a baseline climate change scenario. So that means, again, there's three baselines, one, two, three, and they get progressively worse. Under a high climate change scenario, this projection increases to an additional 60,000 to 250,000 children's deaths by the year 2100. The World Health Organization estimated that climate change contributed to more than 150,000 deaths and 5.5 million lost disability-adjusted life years per wild, that means that 5.5 million people would die much earlier than anticipated based on certain climate change scenarios. Life expectancy will go down dramatically. Who's the most vulnerable? Groups such as children, the elderly, and people with low socioeconomic status are particularly vulnerable to the effects resulting from climate change. That's always the case. People with low socioeconomic status, they're always the ones who get the stiff, the worst. I mean, look at the COVID data. The people who got stiff, the worst are who? Poor folks. You know, it's just always going to be those folks who are on the lowest economic ladder who get it the worst. And that's gonna be a reality of climate change as well. Climate change poses a significant threat to children's health because children have a unique metabolism, behavior, physiology, and development characteristics. They're still developing, right? So all these different changes that are gonna be happening within the environment is gonna have dramatic impacts on their ability to develop properly, right? Many of the main killers of children, malaria, diarrhea disease, and malnutrition are very sensitive to climate conditions, and they are expected to worsen as a result of climate change. Now, an illustration of how climate change impacts the physical, mental, and community health. You know, this is what we, you know, in psychology when I teach. So when we look at this illustration, we can see, right, the impact of climate change. Right? The medical and physical. So most of you guys are MDs. You know, these are the things that you're going to have to be looking at, like the changes in fitness and activity levels, heart-related illnesses, allergies, increased exposure to waterborne and vector-borne illnesses. And then folks more focused on the mental health perspective is they're going to have to deal with what? The undeniable stress. Right? Anxiety, the depression, the grief. Right? The sense of loss. You know? Not only PTSD, but what? Other forms of traumatic stress disorder. Not post, but chronic and complex. Right? Not only the single event that happened in the past, but the events that are continually to perpetually happen in the present. And the complex trauma stress disorder, which is, I anticipate more. And how much anxiety that induces in one. Right? So it's not only post-traumatic. We're talking about chronic and complex traumatic stress disorder for many of people who are going to be affected by the worst versions of climate change. And how do we as therapists, how do we as psychiatrists, how do we deal with what? Because here's the thing about the mental health profession, whether it's psychiatry, psychology, counseling, psychotherapy, whatever the case may be. Our bread and butter. Our bread and butter is talk therapy. And they want some medication too, right? But that's our bread and butter. That's what we do. We talk. We talk psychoanalytic, CBT, all this other stuff. But talk therapy. But talk therapy assumes a level of consistency and structure. Right? It assumes a level of structure that we have. Like people come to your office. You go to group counseling. They can go home or shelter. There's some level of resource. Some level of consistency. Climate change is saying you won't have any of that. So the question becomes from the field of psychology and psychiatry, what have you, is when we think about climate change, is talk therapy enough? Will it be enough? When someone's lost everything, and we come and say, it's going to be okay. Really? Well, let's talk about that. Let's CBT this. Let's reframe. Psychoanalytically, let's talk about the unresolved anxieties in childhood, in your childhood, that's led you to be distressed about the fact that you just lost your house, your place of business, your sister, your crops, everything. Let's talk about this psychoanalytically. Let's do some narrative therapy, right? Let's do the empty chair thing, right? Or I can give you some Ambien or some Ritalin or something like that to calm you down. It makes, if we don't make an attempt to change how we view this, right, how relevant are we? When climate change threatens to destabilize, right? Remember, our talk therapy ability relies on consistent structures, right, that are in place. Climate change says those structures are going to be destroyed. Parts of Miami and Florida are going to be underwater. Parts of, you see what Hurricane Sandy did to New York. They said of all the, most of the water that melted in Greenland were melted. Water, sea level rise in New York will rise to the elbow of the Statue of Liberty, right? Jersey Shore, gone. I had a student who's from the Netherlands. The Netherlands is already below sea level. Think about New Orleans, where you, there's, every cemetery is above ground. You dig 60 feet deep in New Orleans, you're hitting water. Think about the river that's in Utah. I forgot the name of the river. It's drying up. Think about the wildfires that are destroying everything on the West Coast. And people say, well, the Midwest is okay. The Midwest ain't nothing but flatlands. All you're going to get is tornadoes and everything else, wreaking havoc, dust storms. We've already had a dust storm in the Midwest about a month ago. That caused a crazy accident, a 45 car accident on a highway in Chicago, south suburb of Chicago. So these are the things that climate change is, this is what's happening. I'm just talking about America. Let's not talk about places like India, which is now the most populous country in the world, right? India, and I've been to India, and the poverty is a whole nother level. They have a horrible care system. There's really such a thing called slumdog. I thought, I didn't know that was real, but that's really, that's real. That they refer to a whole class of people as slumdogs. That means you don't value their humanity at all. So once this happens, think about what happens when climate change hits places like the Middle East, and the destabilization of sovereign countries, and immigration, and borders, and terrorism, and terrorists exploiting those. The systems will fall, and we have what? Talk therapy. We have to be, we have to, I'm not saying, here's the thing. The flip side of that is, we have talk therapy, but we have to keep in mind, we are also at the forefront of understanding the real psychological and mental pain that people are going to be dealing with. So we have a voice. We have a power in that, because we can articulate what that actually means to people who do have the ability to make some policy changes, right? Engineering changes, all types of changes. We have the power. We understand that power, that we heard it from the horse's mouth. We know what these people are going through. We understand their pain, and we got to tell you, your decision, this policy, that you're going to design is not cutting it. It's not cutting it. But that takes us out of the realm of what? Talk therapy, doesn't it? When we think about the five forces, right, of psychology, right, the first being psychoanalytic, the second being behavioral, I think, constructivist? I don't know. No, behavioral, I don't remember. The third being existential, humanistic. The fourth being multiculturalism, cross-culturalism. The fifth being social justice, right? These are the forces that have the paradigm shifts in the field of counseling psychology that have taken place over the 20th century, right, 21st century. We've just advocated for the social justice. What does it mean to be a psychologist or a mental health professional and think about your work in relation to social justice? What does that mean? That means it takes you outside of the what? Of the therapy session, doesn't it? It should. Working with lawyers, working with politicians, that's what it implies. I am advocating that what? That the sixth force has to be what? Climate change. It has to be because it's an existential threat. That threatens everything. How we as professionals go about our work, right, it shifts the idea of what do we find? What is meaningful to people? Everyone has to feel a sense of meaning, right? A lack of meaning is one of the central causes for mental health issues. Climate change threatens all of those things, right? What you deem, what you grew up to deem was meaningful may not be anymore once you've lost everything. How do we deal with that? Let me get off my soapbox. My apologies. All right. So we talk about mental health under threat, right? What time is it? Oh, my God. I got to wrap up because you guys, do you guys have questions? I would assume. Okay, okay, all right. So this is just saying that the ability to process information and make decisions without being disabled by extreme emotional responses is threatened by climate change. That means if you're in a constant anxiety and stress, you can't think straight. That's what climate change is going to bring, right? We can't make good decisions under constant duress, and this is something that's going to happen. This is going to erode our ability to be interpersonally connected with people because it's going to be all about survival. If we are reduced to our survival instinct, Maslow's Hierarchies, when we think about that first layer, the safety and security, right? If we're reduced to just that, how do we survive the next day? Then our sense of accountability to our fellow man will diminish. Now everyone becomes a means to an end rather than an end of themselves because we're trying to what? Survive. That's a scary dystopia that we're thinking about. I'm not thinking about Mad Max and all that other stuff, but still, it's a scary idea to think about, right? Come on, come on. All the type of mental health impacts that we're talking about, acute mental health impacts include trauma and shock, strains of social relationships, depression, anxiety, suicide, substance abuse, aggression, loss of identity, personal occupation, feelings of helplessness, fear, fatalism, you know, eco-anxiety. These are all the mental health issues that we're going to be dealing with, folks, that we're going to be dealing with. And we have to work together, right, to be able to be relevant as climate change starts to really settle into our reality. And it is. Because we're acknowledging the issue, yet still our approach is still very Western, still very technological. And until we make an adjustment into how we think about it, it won't get better. Because remember, climate change is a momentum force, right? You could change everything today, and guess what? The momentum of climate change is still going. It slows down the momentum. That's what we're hoping to do. But in terms of reversing that momentum, that takes even longer. So even if we do everything, cut carbon emissions, everything else, we're going to slow down that momentum. But it's still going. That's the scary thing. It's not like a light switch. Okay. I'm going to stop there because this gets into ‑‑ you guys have the PowerPoint, right? Okay. So this is a little bit more of a reiteration of, like, you know, the impacts on the unwell and stuff like that that you can go through yourself. The impacts of climate change, air pollution, floods, heat waves, droughts, right? These are the realities, right? The consequences of climate change in terms of toxic exposure, decreased water supply, food shortages, population displacement, and its impacts on communities. These are the realities of what severe level three climate change will do. And this is where we're headed. This is not like ‑‑ I'm just waxing poetic. This is where we are headed. The changes that we're doing, changes that we're engaging in, the efforts are not enough. They're not enough. So this is a real possibility. How do we stay relevant as a talking therapy profession? How do we stay relevant in that space? How do we galvanize our voice to be relevant in that space? We really need to think about that. And this is why I propose that this climate change thing needs to be the sixth force. Okay. With that being said, in conclusion, I got there, didn't I? All right. Climate change is indeed an existential threat. It impacts the very sense of what we hold as meaningful. It changes that idea of meaningful, what it means to be meaningful. And as therapists, as talk therapists, even psychiatry when we can prescribe medication, what else can we do to be relevant in this forthcoming inevitable context? Because we have a power that we have to tap into to say, hey, we know what's really going on mentally. And if we don't tap and use that resource well, how relevant can we possibly be? I'm Dr. Andre Marseille. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. So questions, questions, questions with our about 12 minutes. Yes, sir. Hi. Thank you for your inspiring talk on climate change. And I would like to ask your reflections on a little bit of the other side of the metal. Where I'm from, I think in more popular media, you see young people in their mid-30s who are actually deciding not to take children because of climate change. And I somehow feel that that is also not the right decision to do. But it's very difficult to have a rational conversation about that. What is your reflection on that problem? The fact that the younger generation is kind of not wanting to have children as a result? Well, I think it's, well, one, it suggests that they're very aware, right? Which is kind of a good thing. The second thing I would say is they're absorbing the facts. And one could say, are they being selfish or selfless? Right? Are they being selfish in saying, I'm not going to have children? Or are they being selfish in saying, why bring children into this world knowing what's going to happen and putting them through that hardship? So I don't know what the right answer is, but I think that's the context in which we need to think about it. And the fact, I would say the plus in that is the fact that some young people are having that level of awareness, right? Because it's not, I'm sure that that's the issue that you're bringing up in terms of them not wanting to have children is one thing. But I'm sure they have a lot of other thoughtful ways of dealing with climate change as well. In terms, I'm sure they're the ones that are composting. I'm sure they're the ones that are doing the EVs. I'm sure that they're the ones that are being more engaged because they're so aware. But I think it's an issue of, are they being selfish or are they being selfless? It's a thoughtful question that needs to be discussed in further detail. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Hello. I'm a just recently retired child and adolescent psychiatrist who came from Canada to Houston 40 years ago. And for almost 40 years, the bio in front of our house just carried the water away the way it was supposed to. And then in Harvey, of course, by then we'd had one little warning beforehand of 14 inches in the house. But we were up in the attic with my grandson and dog. Wow. And of course, a week or so later, I went into work. So I just want to remind people that it's not them. We're going to be the ones in the middle of that who are really needing to also look at ourselves and help ourselves. And so I think that your call to really getting policy change and pushing the seriousness of this, that it's not those other people, it's all of us. Absolutely. And it's here now. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Yeah. And I mean, the transition from Canada to Houston, that's a heck of a climate change transition. And Houston's an interesting city because Houston, they are rapidly building in Houston for the last 20 years. And the thing about Houston that's so scary is half of Houston is in the flood zone. And they still are building in those flood zones, regardless, despite that, which is a very scary reality. But it goes to show you that Western mentality. And I think that's very scary. But if you're already designated as flood zones, why build whole communities, even though you know that? It's true. It's true. And actually, it's not that they were building in the flood zones. They're building outside. And then they're redirecting. They redirected other bayous into ours, which is why ours flooded. Wow. So they're not just building. It's flat. So they're just building everywhere. And there's nowhere for the water to go. Anywhere, even out in the suburbs. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Very unfortunate. I'm also from Houston and was affected personally by Hurricane Harvey. But I understand the framework of this talk was talking about, like, I guess how climate change can interrupt people from achieving their goals. In the context of extinction, this is great. You want to have a purpose. And a lot of people will not be able to achieve the purpose they desire through climate change. So I wanted to maybe offer a slightly alternative perspective. And I know a lot of times, like, and especially as she's mentioned, with regards to advocacy, you can feel like a large burden, right? It's like, am I doing enough? Will I ‑‑ is what I'm doing even consequential? And people feel overwhelmed by that purpose and, like, kind of existentialism is, you know, there's no pre‑driven purpose. But, you know, you choose what's the purpose that makes your life meaningful. And some of the activists that I've talked to, they've kind of offered a different perspective. They feel like, and maybe I'm a part of this line of thought as well. It's like, you know, have you ever seen the movie Soul? You know, right? He finally achieves his goal at the end and he feels empty. It's like it's not what he thought it would be like. Maybe subconsciously a lot of these advocates, they feel like they picked a goal that's not going to end. Like, even if we say we achieved the 1.5 Celsius goal, it's not an ending goal. It's something that will give their life meaning, something that will all come around. And I know it is something that is something dreadful, but maybe it's something that can, you know, it's a welcome challenge. That, you know, if we are able to overcome it, like, wow, look at what we've done as a, right? Right, exactly. Sure. Go for it. I don't think. Oh, sorry. Oh, boy. Well, I never shut up. And anyone who knows me here knows I never shut up. I think that I want to thank you for bringing a complex idea, philosophical, to the real experience in our everyday living. And I want to challenge you that in my experience, and I live this every single day with my colleagues from Climate Psychiatry Alliance and the work on this, it is not the outcome. Because you've already said, this has, is already happening. It is the meaning that I think I derive and others can in the process of doing the work, in the process of applying yourself to engaging in one of the naughtiest problems in our world now. And I think that this idea of developing meaning around climate change is so essential. And you've also talked about another level in the experience of meaning, which is being, you know, my family, my history. But also, we can create some of those experiences also of meaning by being collectively together as we face this issue. And I'm just going to give my little advertisement. Our caucus is meeting today at noon in the Marriott Marquis. Join us if that's a place that you want to join this meaningful family. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You know, it's not like if I reach this end of the line, I'm done. Yeah. So thank you very much for your presentation about this topic. I feel like this is something we, well, I often discuss with my friends and colleagues the impact it has on our profession. I'm struggling a bit. You mentioned how it works with responsibility and accountability. And I'm struggling a bit because I feel I am in a privileged position to be able to make certain sustainable choices. It's a very unequal problem. You mentioned the people who are suffering from this will be people in a low socioeconomic status, children, elderly. And they are often not in the position to make sustainable choices and to carry the responsibility and the accountability. So in my opinion, I feel like government should be doing way more to help us tackle this. I was wondering what your opinion is about how this works with the accountability towards our fellow living creatures regarding this inequality. Yeah, I didn't emphasize the point, but it's a presentation in and of itself, but how does poverty impact climate change and the desire to impact the community in a way that we can do long-term sustainable activities to reduce climate change? The reality of it is that when we talk about poverty, it boils down to what? To the issue of survival, to the issue of short-term gratification. Not because you want to be a jerk about it, but because that's what you're looking to just put food on the table and keep a roof over your head the next day. I'm not worried about these broader issues. I can't afford to be worried about these broader issues. I don't have the bandwidth. That's a whole conversation in and of itself is how the impact of poverty on climate change and long-term sustainability, because you ask most people who come from that perspective of poverty, and you see that they don't care because they can't. They may be somewhat aware, but the priority is way down here, because composting and everything else and trying to get an EV, which I can't afford, is not going to put food on the table. It's not going to guarantee that I can stay in this apartment to the end of the month. I think there needs to be a coalition that really talks about what are the consequences of long-term poverty on climate change? That's a whole separate discussion, but I think it's one that needs to be had, absolutely. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you so much for this talk. Actually, it's the best talk I've heard so far. To be honest with you, I'm a psychologist, so I'm on the psychological side. This is fascinating to me. Thank you for what you provided us today. I thank you for a couple of things. I'm not going to mention meaning too much here, because I don't want to get involved in this, but going back to some of the things on existentialism, which I find fascinating of meaning and the self, and where this all started is we elevated ourselves as if we are something. When you start looking at a self, which actually really doesn't even exist, but yet we create a self as if we do exist, as if we do have meaning in some ways, which is odd as a psychotherapist, because that's what I'm trying to do for others. The more you do that, the more you're furthering this problem. I don't know how many people have a cell phone in here, and the gold chip in the cell phones, which is coming from another country, or the shoes that we're wearing, or the coffees that we're drinking, which I also went to Starbucks, so don't feel like you're alone. This is such a complex problem, and I really appreciate what you're saying, but it almost seems like we're almost contradicting ourselves, and going back to the Industrial Revolution or where we're going, the more sophisticated we become, whether it's in my field or psychiatry or anywhere else, to go backwards just seems almost daunting. I understand that everything we do, I do compost, I do garden, and all of these things that I try to do, but it almost seems kind of ironic and contradictory sometimes, and I don't know, myself as the younger generation, how to start evaluating that and actually be a part of that change moving forward. Well, welcome to the human experience. Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, so the question I have is simple in some ways. Is it existential guilt, or is it existential shame? How would you define the difference? Thank you. Thank you for asking me. Talking about worthiness, okay, so it's not guilt because I'm stuck in a context, and I can walk to work, and that, no pollution. I could ride my bike to work, but I don't, and I could, I do, is it worth it? And so, in some ways, is it, am I stuck with it, or am I choosing it? Is it, what is my time and energy worth? And in some ways, I think shame captures the sense of how am I going to solve this existential problem this morning, today, in this, there's no, there is no future, there is no past, there is only present, okay? All your projections, you cannot predict the future. I know you're, I mean, I'm not saying it's not going to happen, but what's happening is in the moment, and we are making choices every time we move our bodies, and those actions are a burden, I mean, we have freedom, but I don't feel free, so, and in some ways, there's not a, okay, so, and we're trapped by words, too, so, I mean, you use guilt, and guilt's fine, but in some ways, I'm ashamed because, I'll say, it's fucked up. Yeah. Thank you. I would say, shame or guilt, pick your poison, I think that as long as, the question is, it's one thing to experience whether it's guilt or shame, the question becomes, is it enough to motivate you to make a different decision? And I think that's the challenge that many of us have, because the kryptonite to that is convenience in the ease of things, right, whether we have shame or guilt, and your question, your statement about the present, or only in the present, the past, it doesn't matter, again, I have to be mindful that that's a very Western way of thinking about things. If we're talking, if I was talking, making a lecture to an indigenous culture, or in the east somewhere, they would say, absolutely not, that we're in the present, and the past is heavily influencing how I'm thinking now, and the decision I'm about to make, the past is heavily influencing that, and that's going to set a stage for the future, so I just think, again, it's, when we think about sustainable changes, it has to be a paradigm shift from that Western mentality to one where we're harmonizing with nature, rather than trying to conquer it. So, my cultural context is, I come from the Midwest, went through 12 years of Catholic education. Same like me. And lots of guilt trips. So, I don't know if this is true, but this is what I learned. Regret plus blank equals guilt. The blank is the gift that keeps on giving, and what it gives is self-hatred, self-recrimination, self-attack, and so, I've always struggled with, my mom says, you need that guilt so you do better, and I said, well, I could just sit and regret, I regret, you know, and I don't have to hate myself, because how do you motivate long-term change when it's rooted in self-hatred? So, I always say, dump the guilt, there is no positive guilt, Mom, shut up, and let's go over to regret, where you don't have all that crummy feeling going on. And so, that was interesting, you said something about positive guilt in one of your slides, and I'm like, oh, I don't know. But I think it's a worthy discussion about whether that really is contained in guilt, you know? Yeah. I would say in response that, I mean, so you take it to a whole nother level, right? Guilt and shame, and then you say self-hatred, right, so that's, you know, we are walking, the human being is a walking contradiction paradox all the time, but there's so much awareness that we have about what's better, what's best, and we still don't do it because of whatever reasons, and that, so that should hopefully generate a sense of guilt or a sense of maybe even sometimes shame, which allows us, hopefully will motivate us to make better decisions in the future. I think when we get to a level of self-hatred, that's a whole different neurotic sort of thing. The motivation to change sometimes, I think it's okay sometimes, because humans are valuable, but we're going to make mistakes. I mean, the history of those civilizations has shown us this. We have to be accepting of that reality that we can't be perfect, so guilt and shame does come with that. I think when we get into the realm of self-hatred, that's where I call you guys for a one-hour session to really deal with some stuff, but I think it's okay and it's appropriate that shame and guilt can be motivators, and if they motivate you to make better decisions, then what happens? You start to replace negative memories and negative decisions with what? Positive memories and positive decisions, and eventually that overtakes. So what we're really good at is trying to understand our own internal experience and better than most people, other people's internal experience. That's a big part of what we do. Who cares? I mean, the fate of everything living depends on our behaviors now and the actions we take. It's all really nice to worry about yourself. Get off your ass and do something. Yeah. Yeah. I am here. In that light, I would like to ask you to think about how can we implement this in our general practice right now? I mean, if a lot of problems I talk to with patients, if you, on the other side, talk about extensionism, a lot of these problems could actually be obsolete or non-existent if something like this is going to happen. How would we be able to make people more aware of this right now? Okay. That's a heavy one. One is, I think, first and foremost, it's a level of education and awareness. I mean, first and foremost, you got to be aware of this stuff to even formulate the possibility of caring about it, right? Because I think one of the points I made in my slide was that we either choose to be ignorant about this stuff or because we just hear it, it sounds so distant. It sounds so like that issue is over there, right? We know as we think about this more that every decision we make impacts climate change, right? Getting in our cars, whatever, it impacts climate change. I think part of what the education is is to explain how certain people's daily decision-making, how they cook, how they travel, the clothes that they buy and where they're from, helping them understand that those mundane decisions that you make that you don't think about, those are the type of things that are contributing to climate change, right? And here are some alternatives that you can engage in to give your contribution, right? Because a lot of the small daily stuff that people can adjust to are not hard. Composting is not hard, right? Separating your plastic bottles from the other trash is not hard, right? Buying plastic is not hard, right? Buying reusable goods and materials is not hard. Being a little bit more responsible with where you purchase your clothes. Those things are, you know, joining an organization, right, is something that's not too difficult for some people. Some people are very busy, but I think it starts with that level of education, right? Helping them understand that, hey, this is what's at stake. This is how we are in our lack of awareness contributing to it, and here are some small things you can do to help push us towards a more sustainable space. I think I would start there. Thank you. You're welcome. Hi. I'm Beth Haas. I'm the chair of the Climate Committee for the APA. And just to extend a little bit the answer that you gave, which was great, what I try to do, where's the young man that was just here, is to add climate change to the conversation with patients. The most important thing you can do is open your mouth and make it part of your definition of neutrality, right? We try to be neutral in the therapeutic space, and actually, it's perfectly neutral to try to have a living planet, right? So to the degree that you can put that into your office, put that into the things that you casually mention to patients. While I was walking the other day and thinking about the bug that I stepped on, I thought about you. I've started to just kind of add stuff like that to what I do. You can teach them about the health implications of it and try to make it relevant for them. So I have a lot of older conservative patients in Nevada where I live, so I talk to them about, I was concerned about your COPD, that did you have an air filter at home, right? And then add into that, because I work a lot on climate change and the implications, and I know that, and I'll just go a little bit further, right? And what I feel like I'm doing is pushing the neutrality back to what is actually neutrality, which is a non-hierarchical view of our relationship to the planet, in which other things are included. So those are my thoughts about that. And while I'm up here, Avatar 2 is an absolutely terrible movie, which highlights toxic masculinity beyond what you could possibly conceive of, and so it's not a great model and portrays indigenous people in the most caricature way we possibly could. So I hope to see everybody out later at the caucus meeting as well. Just a quick note, if anyone wants to have a further discussion about climate change, I do have my business cards on the table up here. If you don't get a chance to ask a question, if you want to stay in contact, please feel free to grab one. So I just wanted to let you guys know that. Yes, sir. Thank you for extending this session. I know we're over time, but this is so important. I think it's good that we should stay until we all have our say on this, and if people want to leave, obviously we're free to do that. We have choices to do that, if there's something more meaningful. But I hope we have the choice and the option to continue this discussion. One of the characteristics of our existential situation is that we are animals. We are not plants. We are not fungi. So I've been hopefully trying not to be too concrete about things, but I've been finding it helpful to try to view things as two competing flows of events in the world of matter, energy, and information, one being entropic, the breaking down of connections and complexity, and the other being syntropic, which is really what we could call the life force or the force of living things, the pattern of living things, which is even planetary. There's a great book by Eric Smith and Harold Morowitz that came out five, six years ago called The Emergence of Life on Earth that is, it's a rigorous and first, it's a sort of, I guess, metabolism first theory of the emergence of life. But there's this planetary syntropy that pervades everything in creation. But we, as animals, we have an entropic need. We eat things. We need to consume things for energy. And we give out shit. We give out waste, which is more degraded. So we have this entropic nature to us. Now we also have syntropic. Now by the way, syntropy contains entropy. The syntropy of the planet contains some capacity for creating disorder. But the overall system is beyond that, it's syntropic. And we have the capacity to grow from a cell into a full person. We have mind, which is very syntropic. We have the ability to love and to make connections with one another that can be syntropic, although they can also be harmful and controlling and destructive. So we have this capacity for destructiveness or being creative. We have some required entropic needs, food primarily, food and air and stuff. But we have gone way overboard on the entropy. Most all our technology from the first tools that we used, blades and flint arrow points, were designed to focus energy to break things apart. And that has just unfolded over the thousands of years of civilization to the point where we have such entropic power, such power. We're seeing it in Ukraine, a country that's just been destroyed in a year. And this is what we need to grapple with. This is our, I think this is part of our existential condition, this dual capacity to be destructive. And by the way, I think that might be what's meant by the dominion thing. I don't think the Bible made us have dominion. That process was well in motion. We have, because of our entropic capacity, it's kind of there. It's what we do with it. Are we going to be a tyrant or are we going to be a benevolent steward of the planet and all of the centropic beauty? And since entropy is so much more, it's at the root of biophilia and how we feel so good when we're out in nature because we're surrounded by centropy, by creation and life. And it's why we feel so crappy when we walk around town here and we see all the broken bodies and the pollution and the garbage in the streets. Anyway, that's my perspective. I think that you're right on track here. We do have to confront all of these. We have a choice. Are we going to go overboard and see everything as something to consume? Are we going to be consumers or are we going to be servants of centropy? Anyway, that's what I had to say. Thank you. I just have a really quick question. This was a great talk and I'm wondering if there's any further readings or resources that you can recommend. If there's any books on this or literature or anything that you would direct us to? In the PowerPoint, the reference page, the last one, has a bunch of resources that I have. Thank you. You're welcome. Any other thoughts or questions or ... I'm sorry, ma'am, in the back, I didn't hear. You said there was something happening at the Marriott? Could you get on the mic and say that again so I can capture that? The Caucus on Climate Change and Mental Health is one of the caucuses within the APA. Our caucus meeting is today, noon, at the Marriott Marquis, Golden Gate, C3, or Golden Gate, and you'll see the lists of the ones. It's a place for us to come together to figure out what you would like to do to join in this work. Great. That's at noon? Thank you. All right. Thank you. Appreciate it. Great talking to everyone. Thank you for attending.

climate change

mental health

existential threat

human identity

meaning

Western mentality

Eastern approach

environmental impact

vulnerable populations

anxiety

depression

complex trauma

psychology paradigm

sustainable initiatives

policy advocacy