Loving the Environment and Psychiatry on Valentine’s Day

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PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

“ . . . every breath we take is like receiving CPR from a tree” - Yoni Stadlin

Yesterday was the Jewish holiday of Tu Bishvat. Due to the Jewish lunar calendar, it falls on a different day of our calendar around this time every year. Over time, the day has evolved into a day of environmental awareness, especially about the value of trees. Today is Valentine’s Day and it evolved from being a Western Christian feast day honoring a saint named Valentine to a celebration of romantic love. Together they can represent an interfaith evolving love for the environment and people, right when it is needed most.

On my video this week, I discussed the need to be focused on a caring kind of administrative love in order to reduce burnout and increase the well-being of all clinicians. That caring can be—and must be—applied to the well-being of our environment. Burnout literally happens in the environment with such destructive wildfires as those in the Los Angeles area recently.

A psychiatric approach is essential to appreciate why climate change evolved from certain human behavioral practices and entitled attitudes, and how we can help patients with climate-related problems. The Climate Psychiatry Alliance, for which I was a founding leadership member, has become an umbrella organization for such loving endeavors.

Caring love is also essential to developing caring positive therapeutic alliances with patients at a time when there are major obstacles, such as excessive online charting requirements and more limited time with patients.

The basis of love is caring partnerships of gratitude for one another. As I have discussed in prior columns on expanding our medical model to a bio-psycho-social-eco one, we also need an ongoing long-term partnership of gratitude for the environment.

We in psychiatry know only too well that loving care can easily go away when 1 side or the other feels neglected, misunderstood, and castigated. In stressful and divisive times like now, there is a tendency to blame those we know because it seems safer. Attention, understanding, and compassion are the therapeutic antidotes for the maintenance of environment and interpersonal relationships.

Trees are connected by strong roots. So should people be best connected by roots of love. Together that would expand Valentine’s love to humans in the context of whatever is around us.

Trees provide about 28% of the world’s oxygen that people need to survive. Psychiatric Times similarly provides a significant percentage of the publications that psychiatry needs to thrive. Wishing a loving Valentine’s Day to all, especially my wife, family, friends, and colleagues, and a special shout-out to the loving editors I work with at Psychiatric Times, Heidi and Leah!

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 presented the third Rabbi Jeffrey B. Stiffman lecture at Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis on Sunday, May 19, 2024. 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.