Join The Physiological Society and Wellcome Trust to understand the real-world impact of extreme heat on mental health and find solutions to address this.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2023 report notes a ‘very high confidence that climate change has already negatively impacted mental health globally’.
Despite this, the mechanisms driving the interactions between worsened mental health outcomes and heat are still poorly understood, even though the burden of disease from anxiety, depression and psychosis and their related co-morbidities remains high, and is likely to worsen due to the negative impacts of climate change.
This online workshop, organised by The Physiological Society in partnership with Wellcome, is designed to explore gaps in our current understanding of mechanistic drivers of mental health problems in response to rising heat, where existing evidence might offer some clues to the basic underpinnings of these disorders and how we can develop new and improved interventions that are valuable to those most at-risk across the world.
The workshop will bring together a small group of experts in the area including physiologists drawn from across the world. We are particularly keen to hear from academic psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, epidemiologists and neuroscientists, heat experts, climate change experts, mental health practitioners, people with lived experience, pharmacologists, policymakers and others. climate change specialists. If you have expertise in any of the following areas, we would be delighted to welcome you to the workshop.
The purpose of the workshop is threefold:
- Identify and prioritise key research gaps,
- Build a transdisciplinary community that can respond effectively to the identified research gaps,
- Discuss how future funding calls related to extreme heat and mental health outcomes can effectively respond to the interrelated challenges associated with heat and mental health.
An agenda for the session along with confirmed speakers and attendees will be circulated ahead of the meeting.
Spaces for this workshop are extremely limited, if you would like to participate in the workshop, please email The Society’s Policy Team at policy@physoc.org