World Mental Health Day 2024 – An interview with Dr. Nate Charach

World Mental Health Day 2024 – Dr. Nate Charach

It’s World Mental Health Day! This day provides an opportunity to reflect on the significance of mental health and the ongoing need for greater awareness, understanding, and support. Mental health impacts all areas of our lives, yet many individuals still struggle to access care and overcome stigma. This day reminds us that mental health is just as crucial as physical health, urging us to prioritize self-care, seek support when necessary, and strive to create a society that values and supports mental well-being.

PEACH Health Ontario is highlighting the essential role psychiatrists play in mental health care. This article showcases the dedication of these professionals who offer care and push for systemic improvements in mental health services. By sharing their experiences and perspectives, we hope to acknowledge their contributions and spark further dialogue about the importance of mental health within healthcare.

Dr. Nate Charach is a psychiatrist based in Toronto whose passion for mental health has evolved to include addressing the emotional impact of the climate crisis and other global challenges. During his residency, Dr. Charach did a fair amount of group work and initially practiced in a couple of hospitals. His concerns about the climate crisis led him to study sustainable housing at the Earthship Academy. He also completed a permaculture design certificate, which is all about how to work with nature rather than working against it, as our culture tends to do. His outlook shifted after reading Active Hope, a book on how you can strengthen your capacity to face a crisis so that you respond with resilience. This book inspired him to connect his mental health work with global crises, including climate change, wars, and systemic failures.

Through his practice, Dr. Nate Charach helps individuals distressed by overwhelming issues, offering clinical and non-clinical group workshops. These sessions guide participants in engaging with their emotions constructively to inspire action, acknowledging the collective need for healthier ways to process grief and trauma. His workshops serve not only those with diagnosable mental health conditions but also anyone deeply affected by the state of the world.

In addition to his clinical work, Dr. Charach is currently undergoing a 10-month training in Indigenous-led evidence-based psychotherapy, with Elder Dennis Windigo. It is about healing trauma through Indigenous wisdom. This experience has deepened his understanding of land-based trauma, recognizing how the disconnection from land affects people. He shares how healing this disconnection is essential to both individual well-being and climate justice, emphasizing the importance of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples as part of this journey.

Q1. What inspired you to pursue this profession and take on such a diverse range of roles within it? 

“I was aware that mental health as I was practicing it wasn’t addressing our bigger problems,” he shared, adding that while he was concerned about these larger issues, he didn’t initially know how to approach them. “There was not a field to join,” he said, so he started by “trying to create conversations in the places where I was.” However, Dr. Charach recognized that while this approach sometimes made a difference, it often wasn’t enough. It wasn’t until he came across the book Active Hope by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone that showed him how he could combine his passion for mental health and his concern for broader global issues into a more meaningful practice.

“The book has been very transformative for me,” he noted, adding that it shaped the foundation of the groups he runs today. His approach integrates the teachings of Active Hope, where participants read chapters, engage in discussions, and participate in exercises that help move beyond cognitive understanding to a more embodied integration of healing. This, coupled with his study of Indigenous wisdom, has helped Dr. Charach recognize the depth of trauma held in the body, guiding him toward a more holistic practice.

Q2. How can individuals and communities contribute to fostering a more supportive mental health environment, especially in an increasingly stressful and fast-paced world?

When discussing how individuals and communities can foster a more supportive mental health environment, Dr. Nate Charach emphasized the need to reconnect with and understand our emotions. Drawing from his experience as a general outpatient psychiatrist, he noted that the core issue across many mental health challenges is a tendency to avoid or suppress emotions. He explained, “Underlying each of these presentations was a similar relationship to people’s emotions… emotions were deemed to be dangerous, and certain ones needed to be shut down.” This emotional suppression, he said, often begins in childhood, where society has conditioned parents and children to minimize emotional expressions such as sadness or rage. “The child will always choose the love of their parents… and shut that part down,” Dr. Charach explained, pointing to the emotional disconnection that results from this learned behaviour. Instead of avoiding emotions like grief, hopelessness, or shame, he shared that we need to listen to them: “We need to listen to that hopelessness… and choose a process that might work,” highlighting how addressing these emotions can help individuals make more informed decisions about their well-being.

Dr. Nate Charach also identified an equally critical shift needed in community activism. He observed that much of the activism today operates from a place of shame and moral judgment, which ultimately creates more division. “A lot of the activism that I see right now, I feel, is shame-based activism,” he noted. He emphasized the importance of inner transformation alongside outward action. Drawing on his experience from his permaculture certificate, he explained, “How do we change our inner landscapes because then we can actually be more effective in changing the outer landscapes?” By shifting from a mindset of scarcity to one of abundance, people can change how they engage with the world. He added, “When we can shift into that abundance mindset… our activism can become more effective as well.” Dr. Nate Charach also shared his perspective on planetary healing, noting that while the challenge may seem overwhelming to individuals, collective efforts can lead to transformative change. “By shifting as many of those individual units from destructive patterns to healing patterns, you could get the emergent phenomenon of planetary healing.”

Creating a resilient community is also about our perspectives. “It’s viewing ourselves in a different way…I as a self could be a human, I could be a family, I could be a community, but myself is also part of humanity, part of…the ecosystem,” Dr. Charch shares. It is essential to consider how individual actions can impact broader communities. An example Dr. Nate Charach shares is that it may be nice for my “human self” to fly on a plane somewhere, but not nice for my “ecosystem self.” “It’s about balancing these different roles of self and viewing self in a sort of bigger kind of way.” He concluded that while success is not guaranteed, action is still necessary: “I choose to act not knowing that it’s going to be enough, but knowing that if I don’t act, it will definitely not be enough.”

Q3. For organizations like PEACH Health Ontario, which focuses on sustainable healthcare, how can promoting mental wellbeing contribute to a more resilient healthcare system?

Dr. Nate Charach emphasized the deep connection between mental health, climate action, and reconciliation efforts, particularly those rooted in Indigenous wisdom. He pointed out, “You can’t do the climate crisis part of things without the reconciliation piece,” underscoring that healing the climate and healing mental health go hand in hand, especially when addressing these issues through the lens of Indigenous knowledge systems.

He recommended learning from Indigenous healing practices, specifically through organizations like Grandmother’s Voice, which guides mental health healing as part of reconciliation. He shared, “They have a two-day conference coming up in November… it’s sort of first steps to reconciliation, but with that comes a lot of mental health healing wisdom.” Dr. Nate Charach stressed that these principles are vital for healthcare and climate resilience.

Dr. Charach also highlighted the importance of fostering connectedness within healthcare organizations to promote resilience. He shared how workshops are another resource for this. “I could run a workshop for an organization, which would also likely be helpful in terms of…having them be able to have more connected and [have] vulnerable conversations with each other.” This deeper connection, he emphasized, would lead to systemic change, allowing healthcare professionals to collaborate more effectively and bring about meaningful reforms. He further recommended the book Active Hope as an essential resource for building resilience in challenging times.

By integrating mental well-being practices into their core operations, organizations like PEACH Health Ontario can create a more supportive, resilient healthcare system that is better equipped to address mental health challenges and broader environmental crises.

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Check out our website for additional profiles about psychiatrists for World Mental Health Day!