ITRC PNW Transformational Resilience Network

By Victoria Knight, Kaiser Health News, July 18, 2019. Therapist Andrew Bryant says the landmark United Nations climate report last October brought a new mental health concern to his patients. “I remember being in sessions with folks the next day. They had never mentioned climate change before, and they were like, ‘I keep hearing about this report,’” Bryant said. “Some of them expressed anxious feelings, and we kept talking about it over our next sessions.” The study, conducted by the...

The Daily Dose, July 22, 2019 by Carly Stern https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/tomorrows-doctors-will-diagnose-the-mental-toll-of-climate-change/95540 First-year medical student Anna Goshua was interviewing an emergency room physician in March to learn more about the job when she heard about a patient who had come all the way from Puerto Rico to that ER in Massachusetts for health care. Hurricane Maria had wiped out all prospects of the patient seeking care at home. A surprised Goshua pored...

CRI is excited to announce new trainings! We will have online trainings in July, and an in-person training in September. July Online Trainings CRI Course 1 LIVE WEBCAST: Trauma-Informed Training A dynamic 2 part six-hour LIVE WEBCAST course, Course 1 introduces CRI’s capacity-building framework for building resilience, KISS. Knowledge, Insight, Strategies and Structure describes our community’s learning and movement from theory to practice and how to implement evidence-based strategies into...

“I believe that everyone, especially a child, deserves to know how their brains are shaped by environment, to then understand their capacity for building proactive protective factors. We all deserve to be super heroes as we do the best we can to consciously live life well. ” - Teri Barila The superheroes we learn about in comics, movies, and TV shows swoop in to save the world with their incredible powers, to shield people from harm. But in our world, no matter how much we wish to protect...

Photo credit: Florida's Governor's Office The story below illustrates the urgent need to proactively build psychological and psycho-social-spiritual--Transformational Resilience--for climate change related disasters. It describes how the mental health impacts of these disasters often becomes most acute months after a disaster occurs, which is long after mental health first aid and other disaster mental health services have ended. Prevention is the only solution, and the focus must be on...

The science of resilience is clear: The social, political and natural environments in which we live are far more important to our health, fitness, finances and time management than our individual thoughts, feelings or behaviors. When it comes to maintaining well-being and finding success, environments matter.

By the time wildfires tore through his home county of Sonoma, California, Park Guthrie was already convinced that the clock on the climate catastrophe was running out. In 2015, Guthrie, a sixth-grade teacher and father of three, had approached the superintendent of the school district where he worked, hopeful she would sign a resolution endorsing action on climate change. He says he got nowhere. But after attending an advocacy event in Washington two years later, and hearing that the U.S.

“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in” -Desmond Tutu. This quote captures the essence of why resilience matters. To Community Resilience Initiative, Resilience is not about “lifting yourself up by your bootstraps” or “bouncing back” from serious harm or injury. To us, Resilience is about self-discovery and self-awareness based on what the ACE Study, neurobiology, and epigenetics tell us...

Finally, plant species have rights , too. Manoomin (“wild rice”) now has legal rights. At the close of 2018, the White Earth band of Ojibwe passed a law formally recognizing the Rights of Manoomin. According to a resolution, these rights were recognized because “it has become necessary to provide a legal basis to protect wild rice and fresh water resources as part of our primary treaty foods for future generations.” This reflects traditional laws of Anishinaabe people, now codified by the...

Renee N. Salas, M.D., M.P.H., Wendy Jacobs, J.D., and Frederica Perera, Dr.P.H., Ph.D. On June 4, 2019, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in Juliana v. United States to determine whether the case will proceed to trial in district court in Oregon. Nearly 4 years ago, 21 children and adolescents between 8 and 19 years of age, including Kelsey Juliana from Oregon, filed suit against the federal government, charging that the government’s inaction on addressing climate...

Rolling Stone, May 16, 2019 By Andrea Marks When San Francisco broke heat records in 2017, with 106-degree temperatures in September, psychiatrist Robin Cooper didn’t hear until after the fact that one of her patients had been feeling dizzy and feverish. One day, he’d fainted in his poorly ventilated workspace. Emergency room doctors had surmised he’d had a virus. But Cooper warned him it could actually be a drug she’d prescribed him interacting with the extreme heat. Certain antipsychotic...

In 2018, a study from the University of Newcastle in NSW found that farmers in rural parts of the state experienced “significant stress about the effects of drought on themselves, their families, and their communities.” Other research suggests that income insecurity related to drought increases the risk of suicide among farmers. Throughout Australia, rates of suicide have increased dramatically for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people over the past 30 years. The rise is due to...