MWe and the Integration of Identity: The Importance of Mind in Confronting the Pandemics of COVID-19, Social Injustice, and Climate Destruction

This invited address will focus on the strange finding that the various disciplines comprising the broad field of mental health rarely offer their trainees a definition of what the mind is. We’ll explore a cross-disciplinary perspective on this question, offering a working definition of the mind and on what a healthy mind may actually be. The core process of linking differentiated parts of a system—be it the brain, an interpersonal relationship, or modern culture—can be called “integration” and be seen at the heart of well-being. We’ll explore how our current set of pandemics, including COVID-19, social injustice, and climate destruction, are calling on the profession of mental health more than ever to step up our scientific grounding in proactively supporting the cultivation of not only resilience in individuals, but a change in how the relational mind constructs identity.