An International Day of Peace and Psychiatry

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PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

Saturday was the International Day of Peace, otherwise called World Peace Day. It was established by the United Nations (UN) in 1981, and the leaders of the UN began a meeting on Sunday to address the multiple world conflicts and wars. Besides the wars getting the most media attention, there is Sudan, which the UN claims has the most humanitarian crises, the violence in Haiti itself, the disruption in Myanmar by the junta, and the community disasters from climate change. President Biden is to address the UN today.

On that same Saturday, organized psychiatry most appropriately set up a 3-and-a-half-hour Webinar addressing trauma, healing, and resilience, with a focus on the Mideast war. It was carefully and expertly developed and moderated by Kenneth Fung, MD, with the support of the American Psychiatric Association’s Global Mental Health Caucus, the Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture, and Breath-Body-Mind. Very well-attended on Zoom, it went from a panel on hate and hope, then on to an interlude of bringing peace to the mind via breathing techniques, moving onto psychological first aide, and then the rare opportunity to hear from the on-site psychiatric caregivers in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza.

By the time that I was to give my brief closing remarks, I felt overwhelmed with the mental health needs in all the populations involved. I sensed that 3 parts of my identity sometimes seemed misaligned: psychiatrist, Jew, and human being. Fighting back tears, I wondered if there was a role for the large integrated community psychiatry model, which has been discussed in Psychiatric Times recently in the interview of Adalberto Barreto, MD, PhD, by Vincenzo Di Nicola, MPhil, MD, PhD, FCAHS, DLFAPA, DFCPA.

As a profession, peace starts within us and between us. It seems to me that we must show that we can be an interfaith and multicultural model of cooperation. In itself, and despite some expected conflict, this webinar conveyed that it could be done. Some recorded segments may become available.

My conclusion was that we need to care for each other as colleagues similarly as we do for patients. I call this approach the 4 Cs for Colleagues, as in foresees:

Compassionate

Concerned

Contrite

Curious

If we brain/mind/body experts cannot work toward cooperation, how can we expect that of others?

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.