Health Archives - Polycrisis

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 […]

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How Systemic Risks Threaten Global Health Security (And What We Can Do)

In this Cross Currents conversation, ASRA members discuss the systemic risks threatening global health security, including pandemics, antimicrobial resistance, climate-driven health crises, and fragmented global governance. They emphasize the need to move beyond siloed, reactive responses toward integrated, multi-level strategies that address the root causes of health insecurity. Key themes include the urgency of fostering

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Towards One Health Action for Addressing Antimicrobial Resistance in the Age of Polycrisis

The authors argue that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) represents a major One Health issue, driven by a range of accelerators, including emerging climate and social challenges. In the context of a worsening polycrisis, they call for an ecosystem-centered governance agenda based on four pillars: identifying local environmental drivers, mapping transmission pathways, reducing AMR stability and selection

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‘History will tell’: as US pressure grows, Cuba edges closer to collapse amid mass exodus

The author examines Cuba’s ongoing polycrisis, characterized by the convergence of economic collapse, demographic decline, social fragmentation, and political repression. Mass emigration is accelerating population loss and weakening public institutions, while economic contraction across nearly all sectors has deepened inequality and eroded the foundations of Cuba’s once-renowned healthcare and education systems. Despite widespread disillusionment, internal

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Mapping the Hope Attractor: A Conversation with Thomas- Homer Dixon

In this conversation, Thomas Homer-Dixon introduces the Cascade Institute’s Polycrisis Core Model (PCM), a novel framework designed to map and analyse interactions among 11 critical global systems, each with multiple potential future states. The model employs cross-impact balance (CIB) analysis to evaluate over four million internally consistent scenarios, ultimately identifying 11 distinct “attractor” states. These

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Tackling the Complex Links Between Climate Change, Conflict, and Health

The authors underscore the urgent need to address the interconnected threats of climate change, conflict, and health. They highlight how these threats not only cause direct harm, such as heat-related deaths and conflict-driven mortality, but also compound vulnerabilities by damaging health systems, disrupting essential services, and fueling cycles of instability. Fragile and conflict-affected states are

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Decolonizing Mental Health in the Polycrisis: Pathways Toward Neuro-Decolonization

The authors argue that the root causes and drivers of the polycrisis lie within the modern/colonial system. Drawing on the work of Yellow Bird and collaborations with Indigenous communities in Brazil and Peru, they examine how neurocolonization—the systemic imprinting of separability, superiority, and subjugation onto ways of thinking, perceiving, relating, feeling, and being—has contributed to

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Global Systemic Stresses: Understanding the Drivers of Polycrisis

This report introduces the Cascade Institute’s Stress-Trigger-Crisis model, a systemic framework that distinguishes between slow-moving stresses that erode the resilience of global systems and fast-moving trigger events that precipitate crises. It identifies 14 global systemic stresses that affect nine vital systems: climate, ecology, food, energy, economy, infrastructure, health, social order and governance, and world order.

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