Author: Anika Nawar Ullah, M.S Media Arts, MIT School of Architecture + Planning

Area of Concentration (Petal): Health Justice + Advocacy and Social Science + Medical Humanities Tracks

Specialty: Integrative Psychiatry, Disaster Psychiatry, Transcultural Psychiatry 

Keywords: community mental health resilience, transcultural psychiatry, planetary health

Background: Solastalgia is a concept that underscores the interdependance between mental health and environmental change within the broader frameworks of planetary health and global Indigenous epistemeologies of interconnected wellbeing. Natural and sociopolitical forces, such as capitalism-linked enviroclimatic disaster and gentrification, are accelerating local-global displacement and degrading ecosystem health, which disproportionately affects the physical and mental health of marginalized communities. Concurrently, promising developments are emerging in the fields of integrative and decolonial psychiatry, planetary health, and the design disciplines of art, architecture, and urban planning to approach new paradigms for collective healing beyond the hegemonic Western model of one-on-one psychotherapeutic care in clinical settings. Innovations such as psychedelic plant medicines, participatory community placemaking, and ecological medicine converge on the concept of relational healing—restoring symbiotic relationships with nature, society, community, and the self—to offer contemporary avenues for cultivating public mental health resilience through place-based healing.

Objective: Collaborate with local-global frontline community based organizations* to research, develop, and prototype transcultural arts/design/nature based interventions for public mental health resilience across the domains of behavioral mediation, community program development, site-specific installation, and structural design.

Research Lessons + Intervention Design: To gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between environmental trauma and common mental health disorders (anxiety, depression, PTSD), autoethnographic and mixed-methods research, interviews, site visits, and community engagement activities were conducted through case studies of post-traumatic community mental health recovery and culturally-rooted collective healing practices in local-global frontline communities* facing recent or ongoing environmental trauma. By blending existing cross-cultural community mental health resilience strategies with emerging ones such as narrative medicine, land-based healing, participatory community placemaking, and trauma-informed design, new interventions were designed for various contexts. Examples incude nature/music/expressive arts therapy based programming with Black youth in New Orleans, structural design of equitable paradigms for harm reduction and relational justice with Indigenous communities during the psychedelic rennaissance in academic psychiatry, site-specific placemaking + storytelling sculptures spanning communities in Little Tokyo/Skid Row/Fukushima Japan/Coastal Bengal impacted by incarceration or multifacted environmental displacement, and interactive public art installations about transcultural modalities for mind-body healing and emotional expression in park spaces spanning AAPI communities in Los Angeles. These interventions aimed to activate mental health resilience through deepening social/nature connectedness and increasing accessibility of cross-cultural psychotherapeutic excercises. Impact evaluation ongoing with intervention co-design and implementation.

Summary + Future Directions: Environmental trauma inflicts acute wounds which, when unaddressed, can culminate into chronic psychological scars unjustly transmitted across generations and cultures. Place and community-based integrative healing modalities offer culturally-rooted ways to address complex PTSD resulting from intersecting traumas that disproportionally affect local-global marginalized communities. I aim to continue this collaborative work though creation of the ‘Sensory Psychiatry Studio,’ a critical arts and design based initiative that imagines and co-creates public healing spaces that cultivate collective mental health resilience through sensory mediation and social-cultural-ecological placemaking.

*Partner Communities/Organizations/Funding

Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies, New Orleans, Lousiana, Bounce Back Program funded by NIH Office of Minority Health Arts and Mental Health Resilience Grant [post Hurricane Katrina community mental health response organization]

State of Hawai’i Department of Mental Health [post Lahaina Wildfire psychiatric disaster response team]

UCLA PsyStart Pediatric Disaster Network

UCLA Center for East West Medicine and Shanghai Univesity of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Chinatown Service Center [post Monetery Park shooting mental health response team], South Asian Network, funded by Cyrus Tang Foundation Integrative Psychiatry Fellowship 

Little Tokyo Service Center, Skid Row Los Angeles Community Action Network, funded by Sustainable Little Tokyo Initiative

Sursuna Environmental Artist in Residence Program, Kolkata, West Bengal [post Cyclone Amphan recovery efforts]

Nishiazu Village Artist in Residence Program, Fukushima, Japan  [post Fukushima Nuclear Disaster recovery efforts]

UCLA/CDU Ecological Medicine and Psychedelic Studies Initiative

Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines

Climate Psychiatry Alliance

ARTogether, Oakland, California, funded by Asian American Women Artists’ Association