Unpacking Emotional Baggage in the New Year

Psychiatry & Society

Unpacking Our Emotional Baggage

This video from a year or so ago began with my wife singing an excerpt from John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jew Plane”, suggesting an increasing concern about separation and loss. I added a show and tell picturing a sad and an angry suitcase on a pair of socks! Unfortunately, over the past year in regard to the 2 major wars, grief and loss has been escalating.

There is other accumulating emotional baggage, too: trauma from conflict, fear of the national political administration change for half of the country, increasing burnout in the public and parents, and the whole range of what I call the social psychopathologies that I unveiled last year. No wonder, then, that the traditional mental health disciplines are being supplemented by all kinds of life coaches and lifestyle recommendations. Best of all, though, would be an emptying of some of the emotional baggage from these undue social stressors in 2025.

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.