Around 57,000 people live in Al Hol camp in North East Syria - 64% of them are children. Almost 50% of the camp’s population are under the age of 12. Originally established in 1991, Al Hol was reopened in 2016 when anti-ISIS operations began in Iraq, sending thousands of Iraqi civilians across the border into Syria in search of safety. From 2016 to 2018 there was an influx of Syrian internally displaced people (IDPs). During the final offensive against ISIS in Hajin and Baghouz in early 2019, the camp’s population skyrocketed from approximately 9,800 people to over 73,000 people.

Geopsychiatry is a relatively new and exciting field in psychiatry. The discipline studies the interface between geography and psychiatry. The main focus in the field is on the impact and effects due to various factors such as climate change, disasters, globalisation, population growth and movement, urban conglomerations, agricultural production, industrialisation, geopolitics, socio-economic transformations, and cultural practices in the mental health-mental illness processes.

Background:
The long-term health effects of bushfires include the potential to trigger new and exacerbate existing mental health problems.

Objective:
This review aimed to determine the prevalence of long-term mental health issues in Australian populations exposed to bushfires.

Climate change is negatively impacting mental health through multiple pathways. Research to date has largely focused on characterising the link between climate change and mental health and no mental health and psychosocial support intervention has been explicitly designed to address the mental health consequences of climate change. In this commentary, we argue that brief, scalable psychological interventions represent an opportunity to fill this gap.