From 2nd-6th September 2024, a group of international psychiatrists, psychologists, and researchers gathered in Bern, Switzerland for a symposium entitled “Global mindscape: Integrating geopsychiatry perspectives across continents”. This event provided a platform for discussions and knowledge exchanges around the detrimental effects of climate change, conflicts, public health crises, and natural and manmade disasters on populational mental health, as well as possible solutions to these geopolitical challenges faced by people around the globe.

The symposium marked a significant moment for the nascent subdiscipline of geopsychiatry, which seeks to explore the interconnections between distal determinants and proximal outcomes. As an emerging area, geopsychiatry accentuates the notion that health including mental health is influenced by a broader system of geographically-rooted governmental systems and policy decisions, which in turn shape social determinants and local contexts of practice.

Hence, to improve populational mental health and psychiatric outcomes, international factors must be understood and addressed, informed by the overarching principles of social justice and human rights. To that end, geopsychiatry highlights the pluralistic nature of mental health and clinical care, focussing on cross-sectional partnerships across disciplines, sectors, borders, cultures, and communities. During this event, the following articles were recognised as five fundamental steps for further advancing the efficacy and reach of geopsychiatry:

Article 1: Continue to develop a robust evidence-base and incorporate existing work on the geopolitical determinants of mental health into the research, policy, training, and practice architecture (including but not limited to the mental effects of international conflicts, commercial determinants, climate change, natural disasters, migration, socioeconomic disparities, and political ideologies and decision-making).

Article 2: Pioneer cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary partnerships to address the interconnectedness of global environmental and geopolitical factors that influence mental health and enable learning from examples of good practice across cultures. These can help support creation of care models that are responsive to the unique needs of local communities, emphasising culturally sensitive and context-specific approaches.

Article 3: Generate bidirectional knowledge exchanges and offer a repository of information about appropriate assessment tools, data, and publications on the geopolitical determinants of mental health and international policy efforts, including through the Compassion, Assertive Action, Pragmatism, and Evidence (CAPE) Vulnerability Index.

Article 4: Advocate for policy change and international actions by engaging with governmental stakeholders and local and regional organisations to promote policies rooted in the principles of social justice and human rights, which seek to confront adverse geopolitical determinants that may influence mental health.

Article 5: Establish an International Institute of Geopsychiatry in Switzerland open to multiple stakeholders, such as universities, foundations, non-governmental organisations, and also individual researchers and clinicians. This will manage research, policy, and educational activities underpinned by the Centres for Geopsychiatry that have been launched in Brazil, Egypt, India, the Philippines, Paraguay, Thailand, and elsewhere.