Geopsychiatry and the complex mental health challenges of conflict: a review examining local and distal psychiatric outcomes in a fractured world

Armed conflicts can engender substantial detrimental effects for mental health, both within immediate settings and for faraway populations. Guided by frameworks from geopsychiatry, this narrative review underlines the local- and macro-level psychiatric consequences of conflicts, informed by illustrative findings from academic sources and gray literature focusing on contemporary global disputes. Specifically, the review demonstrates that exposure to conflict is consistently associated with elevated rates of mental illnesses, which are worsened by devastated healthcare systems and related phenomena. Subsequently, it highlights how vulnerable populations often experience disproportionate mental health burdens in conflict, before exploring how secondary, distal psychiatric effects can arise from vicarious media exposure, forced displacement, and associated environmental degradation. With the most armed hostilities occurring since the end of World War Two, the paper concludes by considering how the psychiatric discipline can adapt to confront the modern challenges of diversifying patient populations in an increasingly turbulent geopolitical landscape.