Mental Health in the Time of Polycrisis: Geopolitical Determinants and Modern Psychiatry

The authors advance geopsychiatry as a framework for understanding how the compounding pressures of today’s polycrisis are reshaping psychiatric vulnerabilities across communities and societies. Focusing on the emblematic and mutually reinforcing domains of wars, climate breakdown, and mass forced displacement, the authors show how geopolitical instability generates direct mental health burdens through proximal mechanisms such as violence, displacement, and extreme weather, while also amplifying harms through secondary pathways including media exposure to conflict, legal precarity, and environmentally-driven migration. The authors argue that the psychiatric consequences of polycrisis cannot be resolved through patient-centred interventions alone, and that structural inequalities transcending borders demand equally ambitious responses.