The American Psychological Association and ecoAmerica are pleased to offer this update of our 2017 report, Mental Health and Our Changing Climate. Since that report appeared, concerns about the mental health impacts of climate change have grown among health professionals, policymakers, and the public. Research on climate and health has accelerated and many new findings have emerged. With this update, we aim to provide readers with the information and guidance they need to stay current in this field and take effective action.
Indeed, now is the time to act. Climate change has become a crisis. As recent studies confirm, our society must begin now to adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change on health and well-being and move toward reducing climate change. We know how to do this. What is needed is the commitment of individuals, communities, and nations to act.
This report provides the latest information on the multiple effects of climate change on mental health, the structural inequities that lead to some populations bearing greater impacts, and how people think about and respond to climate change. It goes on to describe how individuals and communities can strengthen their resilience in the face of climate change and work for climate policies that will lead to a healthier and more just society.
It is encouraging that so many people are now devoting their talents and energies to finding solutions to the climate crisis. We thank the authors of the report and the many scholars and professionals who contributed to the work presented here. We also thank the Well Being Trust and the other funders for their generous support of the preparation of the report.
We hope you will find this report useful and inspiring. Please join us in taking action to overcome the climate crisis and strengthen the health of everyone.
Table of Contents
WHY WE OFFER THIS REPORT 4
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 5
I. CONTEXT 9
- Our Changing Climate: A Primer 10
- How Climate Change Impacts Personal And Public Health 12
- Mental, Physical, and Community Well-Being: Links to Inequity 16
- Climate Change Concerns In The United States 18
- A Closer Look: The Fight For A Livable Future 19
- Psychological Barriers To A Proactive Response 20
- Climate Attitudes That Can Spur Action 22
- Climate Solutions Benefit Mental Health 24
II. THE MENTAL HEALTH IMPACTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE 26
- Introduction 27
- Impacts Of Severe Weather And Disaster Events 28
- A Closer Look: American Youth: Angry, Terrified, And In Despair 32
- Impacts of Longer-Term Climate Change 33
- Climate Anxiety 37
- A Closer Look: A Solution For Climate Anxiety: Spending - More Time In Nature 39
III. HOW INEQUITY IS EXACERBATED BY CLIMATE CHANGE 40
- Populations Disproportionately Impacted By Climate Change 41
- A Closer Look: Natural Connections: Collaboration With The Environment 45
- A Closer Look: Lessons From COVID-19 48
IV. PROMOTING AND BUILDING RESILIENCE 49
- Resilience Defined 50
- A Closer Look: Arts, Parks, and Climate Resilient Communities 51
- Guidance To Support Individual Resilience 52
- Guidance For Strengthening Community Resilience 55
- A Closer Look: Community Hubs 61
V. ACCELERATING CLIMATE SOLUTIONS TO SUPPORT MENTAL HEALTH
- The Urgent Need For Climate Policy And Investment In The United States 63
As we grapple with a warming world and increasingly unstable weather, our mental health is at risk. Psychologists say that stress, anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder will increase as climate change’s physical impacts accelerate, as many scientists predict. Is there anything we can do to mitigate the mental health risks of climate change? Our guest for this episode is Dr. Susan Clayton, a professor of psychology and environmental studies at The College of Wooster.
The American Psychological Association is the leading scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States, with more than 115,700 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students as its members.
Successful responses to the climate crisis require the participation of all fields and sectors of society. Psychologists have conducted valuable work on the climate crisis and can make even greater contributions to understanding the crisis, mitigating and adapting to climate change, and achieving climate justice. This report from the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Climate Change examines the multiple roles psychologists play in research, practice, education, advocacy, and communications related to the climate crisis and how APA can facilitate expansion of psychologists’ work in these domains.
The task force recommends that APA pursue a set of activities that will both (a) strengthen the field by encouraging a larger number of psychologists, across all specializations, to work on climate change, and (b) broaden the impact of psychologists’ work on climate change by supporting their engagement and collaborations with other fields and sectors. Further, the task force offers recommendations for how APA can help mitigate climate change by improving its own energy use and sustainability practices and encouraging improvements by other organizations and the public.
Responding to the climate crisis is an essential task for the current generation and many generations to come. Although the severity and urgency of the crisis should not be understated, it remains within the capacity of society to reduce its most adverse effects and to promote health, well-being, and justice for all people. Psychologists have the knowledge and skills to design and implement strategies that will help realize these aims. As a leading scientific and professional association, APA can prepare, support, and organize psychologists to address the climate crisis and amplify their work for greatest impact and visibility.
The task force presents this report not only to guide APA but also to inspire individual psychologists, psychology groups and departments, and other psychological associations to devote attention to the climate crisis, and to serve as a model for people and organizations in other disciplines and professions.
The solution to the climate change crisis ultimately will depend on the ability of humans to change behavior. As the science of behavior, psychology is in a unique position to play a very important role in addressing the biggest challenge our planet has ever faced. APA and ecoAmerica recently published Mental Health and Our Changing Climate, 2021 Edition, an update of a 2017 report. Join two of the primary authors for a discussion on the big role that psychologists can play to address this global issue.
Panelists: Susan Clayton, PhD, Whitmore-Williams Professor of Psychology, The College of Wooster Christie Manning, PhD, Director of Sustainability and Environmental Studies Faculty Member, Macalester College
Host: Mitch Prinstein, PhD, Chief Science Officer, American Psychological Association
The American Psychological Association is the leading scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States, with more than 118,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students as its members.
Our mission is to help the world reach “drawdown”—the point in the future when levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stop climbing and start to steadily decline, thereby stopping catastrophic climate change—as quickly, safely, and equitably as possible.
"What can you do? Anything. Recycle your yogurt cup after breakfast tomorrow. Cut your food waste. Try a new veggie recipe. Replace your lightbulbs with LEDs. Go bigger: talk to your school or your place of work or worship about what you could do, together. Join an organization that shares your values and advocates for change. Attend the next climate march in your area, or even start a new one. Begin a petition in your community to require solar panels on municipal buildings. Call Congress and demand a clearer path to net-zero.
Don’t just do it: talk about what you’re doing, and why. We can’t change the world by ourselves. We have to do it together, and that requires us to connect. Talk about why climate change matters, in ways that affect you personally. Encourage others by sharing what you’ve done yourself, and what you’ve seen or heard or read about what so many others are doing. Climate action isn’t a giant boulder sitting at the bottom of a steep hill with just a few hands on it. It’s already at the top of the hill, it’s already got millions of hands on it, and it’s already slowly rolling in the right direction. It just needs to go faster.
One of my favorite ways to take action? Be a good neighbor. That might sound almost too easy, but in an increasingly polarized and inequitable world, looking out for and caring for each other is vital when faced with extreme weather events like flooding, heatwaves and wildfire. Sticking together as a community, building resilience together, is part of the fight against climate change, too."
"On Aug. 4, during the American Psychological Association’s Convention in Minneapolis, nearly a dozen experts turned the spotlight on another more surprising tool: psychology.
'I used to begin my presentations by talking about temperature data and heat-trapping gasses, but now I begin most of my presentations in the same way: by asking people, ‘How do you feel about climate change?’' said Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental organization, during a panel discussion. 'I get the same words everywhere: anxious, worried, frustrated, concerned, devastated, overwhelmed, angry, hopeless, horrified, frightened, heartbroken, and afraid.'
Simply simmering in those negative emotions won’t accomplish much: 'If we don’t know what to do with them, that can cause us to withdraw, to freeze, to give up rather than take action,' Hayhoe says.
Psychology can play a role in helping fight climate change by gleaning the most effective ways to change human behavior and encouraging individuals to take action. Extreme weather events also affect people’s mental health and wellbeing, so psychologists need to be prepared.
Here’s a look at how psychology can be utilized in the climate crisis."
Beyond Walls is a non-profit placemaking agency that uses a creative lens to address community needs. We are a diverse group that believes cities best thrive when they are full of art and have engaged stakeholders and active spaces. Our work revolves around our mission to activate spaces to strengthen communities.
How do we do this?
We introduce public art and curated experiences into the fabric of our communities by partnering with local organizations, municipalities, community members and experts to design, produce and manage projects and programs.
Whether it be a Street Art Festival or artistic lighting projects, these activities are executed to enhance the physical landscape, drive positive economic change and bolster community engagement.
We believe that:
- all communities deserve safe, vibrant, and active spaces
- partnerships and a collaborative community engagement approach produce impactful projects
- thriving public spaces help create stronger neighborhoods and increase the sense of place in our cities
- art-filled, well lit, walkable urban environments help promote economic and lifestyle vitality
Who We Are We are a 100% volunteer nonprofit run by professionals working in the mental health and psychology fields—including a diverse range of psychotherapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, clinical social workers, researchers, journalists, and students—collaborating from across the United States and Canada.
Our Mission Climate Psychology Alliance North America (CPA-NA) addresses the urgent psychological dimensions of the climate and ecological crisis and promotes cultural shifts toward human resilience, regeneration, and equity.
As a hub for climate psychology in the United States and Canada, we:
Educate and train mental health professionals in climate-aware practices;
Foster a collaborative community of climate- and environmentally-aware mental health providers;
Inform the public about the varied and layered mental health aspects of the planetary crisis.
In our work, both in theory and practice, we recognize that interconnected forms of collective trauma, exploitation, and othering—including systemic racism, misogyny, and anthropocentrism—lie at the heart of the climate crisis.
Our Founding Philosophy Our founding philosophy is grounded in a belief in the existence of unconscious processes and in an inner self that feels conflicts. Our founding members believe that our work as therapists involves uncovering these unconscious conflicts, so that people can make better decisions for their lives.
We organize around certain principles, including:
The importance of expanding awareness.
The fact that there is an unconscious that can be brought to the surface and explored.
That it is our job to uncover these unconscious feelings, conflicts, and motivations—to bring us into a more conscious awareness of the more-than-human world.
We have been living in a largely dissociated relationship with the more-than-human world. We’re trying to expand psychology to meet the world– to move psychological work from problems solely between people to problems between people and their environment.
Facing the climate crisis involves processing very difficult emotions that are hard to contain when one does not have a helper. We are here to help clinicians as they start to face these crises, and as they start hearing about climate distress from their clients.
"Climate psychology is a new way of understanding our collective paralysis in the face of worsening climate change.
Climate change is not a problem waiting to be solved. It is a paradigmatic challenge to an economic system driven by fossil fuels and consuming life styles. At the deepest level, the psychological/cultural challenge lies in the belief that, as a species, we are different and special compared to other species; that nature is a resource for us to use.
Feelings matter
Climate change and environmental destruction threatens us with powerful feelings – loss, grief, guilt, anxiety, shame, despair. These are difficult to bear and can mobilise defence mechanisms and coping strategies, which can undermine our capacity to get to grips with the issue. Climate psychology seeks to understand how this plays out both in our individual lives and in our culture.
The focus of climate psychology
Climate psychology seeks to further our understanding of:
- the defences, such as denial and rationalisation, that we use to avoid facing these difficult feelings – and how such defences have become integral to sustaining our exploitative relations with both the non-human and human worlds - the cultural assumptions and practices (e.g. the sense of privilege and entitlement, materialism and consumerism, the faith in progress) that inhibit effective change - the conflicts, dilemmas and paradoxes that individuals and groups face in negotiating change with family, friends, neighbours and colleagues, and - the psychological resources – resilience, courage, radical hope, new forms of imagination – that support change.
The problem with psychology
It is now widely accepted that facts and information about the risk of climate change, taken alone, do not promote change. There is a growing acceptance that the climate change movement could be enriched by incorporating deeper psychological perspectives. But mainstream positivist psychology is often part of the problem, especially when it reduces the human being to an object to be measured, controlled and then harnessed to the profit-making machine that now threatens our collective future.
A deeper psychology
We need a different psychology. Our richest psychological insights have come from literature, philosophy, world religions and the psychotherapies. From such sources, we glimpse some of the complexity and mystery of the human: the raw passions that often dominate our thoughts and behaviours; the internal conflicts and competing voices that characterise our internal lives and give colour to our different senses of self; the effect of systems of domination on the way we think and feel about ourselves.
Cultural assumptions
Viewed from this perspective, it is possible to see how our attempts to defend ourselves against the feelings aroused by worsening climate change are mediated by deep-seated assumptions about ourselves and society. For example, as western consumers, a powerful sense of entitlement may help us to shrug off guilt and shame, or a touching faith in progress can mitigate anxiety and induce complacency. Typically, we will feel torn between different impulses to face and avoid reality: between guilt and cynicism; between what is convenient for us and what is necessary for the common good.
A psycho-social perspective
Climate psychology draws upon a variety of sources that have been neglected by mainstream psychology, including psychoanalysis, Jungian psychology, ecopsychology, chaos theory, continental philosophy, ecolinguistics and social theory. It attempts to offer a psycho-social perspective – one that can illuminate the complex two-way interaction between the personal and the political.
Practical application
It uses this understanding:
- to promote more creative approaches to engaging the public with climate change - to contribute to change at the personal, community, cultural and political levels - to support activists, scientists and policy makers seeking to bring about change, and - to build psychological resilience to the destructive impacts of climate change that are already being experienced."
Having the reality of the destructive forces presented by climate change fully register with people, so they will to act with the needed urgency, is indeed a challenge. And, while the physical and environmental effects of global warming are studied and described, what has rarely been addressed, and is as compelling a topic as any, are the psychological impacts.
This report aims both to fill in the gap in our awareness of the psychological impacts of climate change, and by exposing the emotional side of the issue, to find the place in our hearts that mobilizes us to fly into action, forewarned, determined, relentless. It also is a call for professionals in the mental health fields to focus on this, the social justice issue of all times, with their capacity to work through denial and apathy, to bring insight and commitment before it is too late.
The language of science is, admittedly, not a stirring call to action. Scientists are by nature cautious, and restrained. While this report does not aim to present the forum participants as flame throwers, for this work to accomplish a primary goal, the reader will need to feel something in reading it. The language used here, and some of the questions asked, may feel uncomfortably probing, as they pierce our armor. After all, most of us want to be patriotic, to be optimist about the future. But we need to fully confront certain realities.
If we continue the adolescent-like disregard for the dangers we are being warned of, driving green house gasses up with only casual concern, there will be consequences. As our world begins to unravel and our role is undeniable, all eyes will be on us.
Questions beg to be asked:
• What will the rest of the world think of us?
• Where will we be safe?
• How will we feel about ourselves?
The interplay between the climate realities we likely face and the potential psychological fallout from them was the subject of a conference convened in Washington D.C., in March 2009. A highly respected group of experts offered insights. Their thoughts, recommendations and supporting evidence are presented in this report.
We extend our heartfelt thanks to the RWJ Foundation and to our forum participants. We also note the sad death of forum participant and friend Dr. Jerilyn Ross. She added her characteristic straight talk, practical knowledge, and bright intellect to the discussion."
For the entire report go here: https://www.nwf.org/~/media/PDFs/Global-Warming/Reports/Psych_effects_Climate_Change_Ex_Sum_3_23.ashx
RECENT MAJOR REPORT: Addressing the Climate Crisis - An Action Plan for Psychologists - Report Of The APA [American Psychological Association] Task Force On Climate Change 2022
From the report Addressing the Climate Crisis - An Action Plan for Psychologists
INTRODUCTION
"Successful responses to the climate crisis require the participation of all fields and sectors of society. Psychologists have conducted valuable work on the climate crisis and can make even greater contributions to understanding the crisis, mitigating and adapting to climate change, and achieving climate justice. This report from the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Climate Change examines the multiple roles psychologists play in research, practice, education, advocacy, and communications related to the climate crisis and how APA can facilitate expansion of psychologists’ work in these domains.
The task force recommends that APA pursue a set of activities that will both (a) strengthen the field by encouraging a larger number of psychologists, across all specializations, to work on climate change, and (b) broaden the impact of psychologists’ work on climate change by supporting their engagement and collaborations with other fields and sectors. Further, the task force offers recommendations for how APA can help mitigate climate change by improving its own energy use and sustainability practices and encouraging improvements by other organizations and the public.
Responding to the climate crisis is an essential task for the current generation and many generations to come. Although the severity and urgency of the crisis should not be understated, it remains within the capacity of society to reduce its most adverse effects and to promote health, well-being, and justice for all people. Psychologists have the knowledge and skills to design and implement strategies that will help realize these aims. As a leading scientific and professional association, APA can prepare, support, and organize psychologists to address the climate crisis and amplify their work for greatest impact and visibility.
The task force presents this report not only to guide APA but also to inspire individual psychologists, psychology groups and departments, and other psychological associations to devote attention to the climate crisis, and to serve as a model for people and organizations in other disciplines and professions."
The Resilient Activist envisions future generations living in a healthy, diverse, and regenerative environment.
The world needs inspired and visionary activists who have the resilience to see us through these unprecedented times.
Our Mission
Our mission is to build resilience, optimism, and hope in response to the impact of the climate crisis, fueling the movement from the inside out. The Resilient Activist provides community, self-care, and nature-connected programming that supports emotional well-being and vital ecological change.
What We Do
We offer uplifting and nurturing community-building activities, articles, stories, and programs to give voice and support to those who share our passion for a sustainable, flourishing, nature-connected future.
Our programs are built around the Five Essentials for a Resilient World:
Reconnect to Nature Respect all Life Regreen our Planet Revamp our Spending Replenish our Resources
Important Issues
The emotional toll that climate change is having on our society has caught the attention of those who work in the mental health field.
In 2010, the American Psychological Association released a 230-page report titled, “Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change.” In March 2017, they published another document, “Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance.”
This paper included new diagnostic codes for mental health concerns related to climate change and environmental grief. Terms like ecoanxiety, pre-traumatic stress, and solastalgia (pining for a lost environment) are devastating emotional conditions that affect those who are passionate about a healthy, sustainable planet and who are deeply concerned about the negative impacts of human activities on our ecosystems and non-human beings we love.
Principles
We are a diverse group of nature-loving souls aiming to live in a way that nurtures our own well-being in alignment with the well-being of our planet and to uplift others who are working towards these same goals.
We are guided by principles of kindness, compassion, communication, diversity, deep understanding, transparency, and ongoing education about the grief and angst that activists experience over the pressing issues surrounding Earth’s environmental and social justice needs.
Speaker's note: Ekman's 6 basic emotions are anger, fear, sadness, disgust, joy and surprise. While listing these emotions, she missed surprise. Have you ever felt anxious about our climate? Katharina Van Bronswijk explains why feeling negative emotions about our climate can be beneficial for both the climate and us individuals. With her initiative called Psychologists for Future, she uses her psychological expertise to help people dealing with climate change and to guarantee a sustainable future.
Usually the arrival of a heatwave in Ireland is seen as good news. We change our greetings to one another and ask “Are you enjoying the great weather?”, and the newspapers have front-page pictures of children enjoying ice creams and swimming at the beach. This year feels a bit different. The heatwave is also an ominous sign of climate breakdown. We hear about wildfires out of control across Europe, widespread droughts, collapsing agricultural yields, rivers drying up and biodiversity loss. Worse still, scientists report that these extreme events will only get worse as the planet heats. Once-in-a-lifetime heatwaves could become yearly events — one can only imagine the catastrophic impacts.
This year weather reporters and meteorologists have started to more clearly explain this bad news that comes with the warm weather, but it has not always been welcome. Indeed the accurate reporting of how climate change caused the heatwaves has received a media backlash. Many tabloids across the UK and Ireland have had strong opinion pieces calling for meteorologists to quit this “doom-mongering”, to get back in their box and to just report the “good” weather. More surprising has been how many usually scientifically informed journalists have joined this clarion call for scientists to shut up about climate change and just let people enjoy the good weather.
From a psychological perspective these reactions are understandable. So serious and scary is the reality of climate change that our impulse can be to deny it. It is too painful to consider how our comfortable lifestyles are causing climate change and so we try to psychologically avoid this. So strong can our impulse to deny uncomfortable truths that we will angrily attack anyone who speaks it and cling to implausible alternatives. Denial explains a lot about the growth in anti-science opinion worldwide.
Regeneration puts life at the center of every action and decision. It applies to all of life—grasslands, farms, insects, forests, fish, wetlands, coastlands, and oceans—and it applies equally to family, communities, cities, schools, religion, commerce, and governments. And most spectacularly to climate.
FALL RIVER, Mass. — The entire side of the buildings in Fall River has been used as painting canvases.
Several new murals were recently put up meant to catch the eye, start conversations, and draw visitors.
One of the mural artists responsible is Greg Pennisten who grew up on the South Shore and attended elementary school in Fall River.
"It's really important for people to be able to get some color, you know, and see accessible art," he said.
Pennisten said his piece honors the city’s industrial past and present, inspired by block print patterns from textiles that were produced in Fall River in the early 1900s.
Mario Ramírez of TostFilms for Beyond Walls Pennisten's work is part of a project by Beyond Walls, a nonprofit organization that brings in local, regional, and international mural artists to activate city spaces and encourage community and economic growth.
3. The Public Health Approach Solution Proposed: 00:23:50 - 00:59:26
"Why Prioritize Forming Community-Based Mental Wellness and Resilience Initiatives?
Few people fully grasp this yet, but humanity is in the midst of a civilization-altering event. Accelerating global temperatures are creating a mix of cascading disruptions to the ecological, economic, and social systems people rely on for basic needs, and more frequent, extreme, and prolonged disasters. We are unprepared for the suffering speeding our way. If we remain so the result will be individual, community, and societal traumas far beyond anything modern society has ever experienced. The traumas will threaten everyone's mental and physical health, safety, and security. They will also make it even more difficult to reduce the climate crisis to manageable levels.
New thinking and approaches are needed to address the scale and scope of the traumas speeding our way. This requires a public health approach to enhancing and sustaining mental health and psychosocial wellbeing, not clinical treatment.
A public health approach focuses first and foremost on preventing problems through changes in norms, habits, practices, and policies, not treating symptoms of pathology after they appear. It focuses on the entire population, not just those deemed at-risk or vulnerable--although they must be given special attention. And it emphasizes identifying and strengthening existing and forming new protective factors that help people push back against and remain healthy and resilient during adversities.
Accordingly, a wide and diverse coalition of local residents, groups, and organizations must come together to plan, implement, and continually improve age and culturally accountable, strategies that help all adults and youth enhance their capacity for mental wellness and resilience during adversities. Actions to slash greenhouse gas emissions, regenerate local ecological systems, and adapt to climate impacts should be integrated into the initiatives.
If whole-community initiatives are launched, the indomitable human capacity for wellness and resilience can be activated, the climate climate crisis can, over time, be reduced to manageable levels, and people will regain healthy hope in the future.
Our goal is to build a global movement that inspires people to organize and run initiatives in their neighborhoods and communities that use a public health approach to strengthen and sustain everyone's capacity for mental wellness and resilience during the long climate crisis. We invite you to please join us in this effort."
The biggest obstacle to dealing with climate disruptions lies between your ears, says psychologist and economist Per Espen Stokes. He's spent years studying the defenses we use to avoid thinking about the demise of our planet -- and figuring out a new way of talking about global warming that keeps us from shutting down. Step away from the doomsday narratives and learn how to make caring for the earth feel personable, do-able and empowering with this fun, informative talk.
"Part of the reason certain groups have dominated the conversation could simply come down to language. The reality is that what the term 'climate anxiety' means to a white middle-class European might differ completely from what it means to a poor farmer in Lagos. Why somebody might say that they’re experiencing anxiety is derived from a mishmash of preformed notions of what anxiety is, their background, and what words are available to them. 'Climate anxiety, as a term, is very privileged,' says Ray. 'Not to mention all the emotions that we don’t even have language for, right?'
This chimes with the findings of Mitzi Jonelle Tan, a climate justice activist from Metro Manila in the Philippines. In November 2020, the Philippines was hit by two back-to-back typhoons, prompting Tan’s organization—Youth Advocates for Climate Action Philippines—to spring into action to feed the communities left hungry. They also then asked people how they felt after the event. 'Not a lot of people actually talked about the anxiety and the trauma that they experienced,' Tan says. She thinks this can be attributed in part to the idea of Filipino resilience, which can be a positive thing, but also to the fact that mental health is not talked about a lot in the Philippines. 'And so some people don’t even have the words for it because it’s not correlated in people’s minds.'
There are ways of getting around the linguistic narrowness and relativity of the terminology to get a better picture of the mental repercussions of the climate crisis. Amruta Nori-Sarma is an assistant professor in environmental health at Boston University who studies the relationship between climate change and mental health in vulnerable communities. When conducting research in India, her team relied on basic mental health questionnaires, rather than asking people outright whether they had experienced climate-related effects on their mental health.
What these communities face is not an amorphous threat to their children’s children; they are already battling extreme, record-breaking heat waves. Yet these people might not classify any negative response to such events as climate anxiety. “People don’t necessarily understand trauma, even if they’ve been through trauma—they may not have that same word for it,” she says.
And that’s why the way of tackling the mental fallout of the climate crisis is not going to be one-size-fits-all. “There’s not necessarily going to be a solution that works uniformly for everybody, including people living in the US and people living in India and people in the Philippines,” says Nori-Sarma.
But Wray and Ray reserve optimism that the conversation will continue to evolve—and that it will increasingly recognize and address its own privilege. 'One of the things that can happen is we have a much more robust conversation about all of the emotions that people who are actually experiencing climate change are feeling,' says Ray. But at the same time, she believes we shouldn’t reject climate anxiety as an all-encompassing category for thinking about the mental health impacts of the climate crisis. As a tool for mobilizing people to respond to climate change, 'it’s actually very effective,' she says."
Climate change is not a scientific problem waiting for a technical solution. It’s an urgent, frightening, systemic problem involving environment, culture and politics.
It engenders fear, denial and despair amongst individuals, evasion, indifference and duplicity amongst the powerful.
It forces uncomfortable dilemmas about justice, nature and equality into consciousness. It challenges all of us in modern societies both personally and politically.
To work with these dilemmas the CPA draws on a broad range of perspectives including philosophy, the arts and humanities, ecology and systems thinking.
Our core focus however is in psycho-social studies and the psychotherapy field, approaches which help us to understand the unconscious processes and emotions which control our thoughts, beliefs and behaviour and which manifest in mutually reinforcing systems of defence in society.
Anxiety, guilt and shame make it very difficult for people to face the reality of climate change and lead to denial and disavowal while the norms and structures of everyday life validate and reinforce these responses.
Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns.
The negative impacts of climate change on the health and well-being of individuals, communities, and nations are growing more frequent and severe, with members of some groups—including persons of color, persons of lower socioeconomic status, women, older adults, children, and persons with disabilities—at greater risk than others
Research on the psychological dimensions of climate change can guide new action to mitigate and promote human adaptation to climate change.
Adapted from the United Nations and APA’s Council Policy Manual
Lise Van Susteren, Psychiatrist; Board of Directors, National Wildlife Federation; Advisor, Harvard Medical School Center for Health and the Global Environment
"I am a doctor. A psychiatrist. Over the years I have heard many troubling stories about the human condition. I have worked with individuals who were "on the ledge" emotionally. I have worked with people who fantasize about killing people, and some who have. I have listened to people recount being tortured, abused. I have evaluated the psychological states of foreign leaders who threaten world security. I have heard the details about children who have died at the hands of people who were out of their minds with drugs or illness. People have died in my arms, dropped dead at my feet.
Nothing has prepared me for what I am currently hearing: scientists all over the world warning us about the threat of catastrophic and irreversible climate change.
As a member of several organizations that involve professionals working in the field of mental health, I am stunned that this threat to the health of the planet and the public is so underplayed by these organizations and their members. An official from one leading organization expressed regrets that she was unable to attend a recent forum wrestling with the psychological and mental health aspects of climate change and noted, "no one on the staff is interested." The person she anointed in her place cancelled.
One of the missions of these associations is to relieve human suffering. As practitioners we help people to face reality. We chip away at their denial knowing it can be a cover for behaviors that destroy their lives. When they see the world more clearly, we urge them to take charge - warning of the dangers of being passive."
"Climate change isn’t an inevitable death sentence, and the discipline of psychology must strengthen its ability to act on the issue, new report says."
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https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/mental-health-climate-change.pdf via @dennisar