Looking Toward the 2026 APA Annual Meeting: Psychiatry’s Role in War, Peace, and Collective Healing

If you have followed my videos since 2021, you may remember one of the very first, when my wife Rusti opened with the haunting line, “Last night I had the strangest dream.” At the time, we were emerging from one war while still living in the shadow of others. I had hoped that revisiting that theme would feel historical. Instead, it feels current.

Following our country’s withdrawal from Afghanistan when I first tackled this issue, we have watched the eruption or continuation of wars—in Gaza, Ukraine, and now Iran. Although the names change and the geography shifts, the human cost does not.

I do not know about you, but my sleep has been unsettled and my dreams have been darker, more fragmented. Psychiatrists are not immune to the collective unconscious of our times. We absorb it through our patients, our news feeds, and our own private reflections in the early morning hours.

As we approach the 2026 Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in San Francisco, I find myself thinking of these gatherings as psychiatry’s High Holy Days. In Judaism, the High Holy Days (from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur and Passover in the Spring), there is a communal commitment to soul-searching and collective responsibility. We take stock of who we have been, who we want to become, and where we want to go. Our APA meeting offers something similar. It is our field’s opportunity each year to come together for scholarship-sharing, reflection, and recalibration. We present data, debate diagnoses, discuss psychopharmacology, and examine new models of care. But beneath the academic rigor there are deeper questions of values. In this case, What is psychiatry’s moral role in a world at war? War is not only a geopolitical event; it is a psychological contagion. It spreads fear, polarization, dehumanization, and trauma across borders. We see it in our clinics as anxiety disorders, depressive symptoms, moral injury, and intergenerational trauma. We see it in rising anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racism, and other forms of hate. We see it in families fractured over ideology.

If psychiatry limits itself to symptom management, we miss an opportunity. Of course we must treat posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and psychosis with evidence-based care. But we also have a responsibility to model dialogue, empathy, and nuanced thinking. Peace does not begin at the level of treaties. It begins in one-on-one relationships. It begins in how we listen to a patient whose political views differ from our own and in how we teach residents to tolerate ambiguity rather than collapse into certainty.

This year, I have the privilege and the challenge of presenting 7 sessions at our annual meeting. That number feels symbolic, even biblical. Each session, in its own way, touches on themes of ethics, social responsibility, and the expanding role of psychiatry in public life. I plan to offer brief previews so that even those who cannot attend can consider the questions we will be raising together.
This year we also return to San Francisco. Encouragingly, some of the social challenges that marked downtown during our last visit have improved. The city, like our profession, continues to struggle and to adapt, showing us that renewal is possible but it requires attention and intention. If these meeting opportunities are our High Holy Days, then let us treat them as such. Let us ask what we have contributed to healing, and where we have fallen short. Let us examine how we can help de-escalate conflict, whether between nations or within families. Let us remember that our expertise in understanding the mind carries with it a responsibility to nurture the conditions for peace.

Certainly, none of can control wars. But we can shape the emotional climates in which we live and practice and nurture resilience. In unsettled times, that may be our most sacred work.

I hope for peace in your lives, and in the lives of those we serve.

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specializes in the social, cultural, ethical, spiritual, and religious aspects of psychiatry, and since 2012 is in retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekdays column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He has been an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physical burnout, and xenophobia, among other social justice causes, serving on many related local and national community and professional Boards. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.