When Culture Meets Climate: A New Map for Mental Health (with Dr. Shabab Wahid)

Dr. Shabab Wahid is an assistant professor of global health at Georgetown University’s School of Health and a global mental health researcher working at the intersection of culture, climate, and wellbeing, with active studies in Bangladesh, Kenya, Senegal, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.In this episode of Thrive Dispatches, Dr. Wahid joins Dr. Matt Biel to explore what cross-cultural science tells us about how people experience mental distress. They start with the study that drew Wahid into the field, in which people with schizophrenia in the United States described voices that were harsh and punitive, while people in India and Ghana described companions and friends.They then trace his research in Bangladesh linking sustained heat, separated statistically from floods and storms, to depression and anxiety, and the grief he documents in communities watching their home environments change in front of their eyes.And they dig into his central methodological contribution: how to build mental health interventions that communities recognize, trust, and want to use. That means learning how a community understands the mind, which words people use for distress, and what a good outcome looks like in local terms, from addressing tension in South Asia to supporting a calm heart in Senegal. The lesson of the conversation is a sequence: listen first, then adapt, then treat. A clinic for depression sees no visitors due to stigma; a program for tension brings people back, with friends or spouses at the second session. The sequence holds at home too, down to the question therapists in Nepal ask their young clients: depression like normal depression, or depression where you need help?