Whether or not you are prone to anxiety, the reality of climate change may plague you with climate anxiety. Enough people are confronting this condition that some mental health therapists have coined a new term – “climate aware therapy.”
As explained in an April 2023 article, What is Climate Aware Therapy?, “A climate-aware therapist is a professionally-trained clinician who recognizes that the climate crisis impacts some people on a deeply personal level. The anxiety associated with the loss of nature is significant enough to disrupt daily functioning.”
One such therapist, Lise Van Susteren, MD, is interviewed in the article. She acknowledges that climate anxiety can exacerbate pre-existing mental health challenges, affecting relationships, job performance, and daily functioning. At the same time, Dr. Van Susteren says, “I want to emphasize that distress about climate should not be thought of as pathological. Indeed, we should all be anxious. We should look at climate anxiety as the blinking red light on the dashboard. I help people look at that blinking light as a springboard to action.“
The New York Times recently wrote about the dramatic increase in climate anxiety that mental health therapists are seeing in patients. Referring to therapist Andrew Bryant, who personally experienced a climate wildfire disaster, “The traditional focus of his field, Bryant said, could be oversimplified as ‘fixing the individual’…Climate change, by contrast, was a species-wide problem, a profound and constant reminder of how deeply intertwined we all are in complex systems — atmospheric, biospheric, economic — that are much bigger than us.”
One of the founding papers in this field, The Psychological Impacts of Global Climate Change, was published in 2011 by Susan Clayton and Thomas J. Doherty from the College of Wooster School of Counseling. They point out that impacts can be direct, indirect, or psychosocial. “Responses include providing psychological interventions in the wake of acute impacts and reducing the vulnerabilities contributing to their severity; promoting emotional resiliency and empowerment in the context of indirect impacts; and acting at systems and policy levels to address broad psychosocial impacts.”
In Psycom.net, Wayne Kalyn wrote about his own battle with climate anxiety. “The key for my mental health, I realize, is to feel like we are moving forward, even it’s in centimeters,” said Kalyn. He points to four coping strategies from the Climate Psychiatry Alliance to help you manage your worries about climate change:
- Acknowledge your feelings.
Understand that distressed feelings are normal in the face of real climate threats. - Connect with others who are similarly minded.
In addition to family and friends, some online options for connection are The Good Grief Network and All We Can Save. - Balance the negative.
Cut your consumption of climate disaster coverage. Concentrate on the growing public awareness and concern about climate, and growth in clean energy solutions. - Get outside and recharge.
Spend time outdoors in the natural world. In cities, seek parks, small greenspaces, and trees. Watch a tree move with the wind and weather; you can do this, too.
If you need professional counseling help to manage your fears and anxiety about climate change, there are resources available to help you find a therapist who has focused on climate aware therapy. These two groups are a good starting point for your search:
