Therapists are seeing a growing trend in people wanting to talk about climate change. Their clients might have trouble with doomscrolling and becoming depressed over environmental news, or fight with their partners about whether or not to bring a child into this world, or feel helpless over the actions of their governments and big oil companies. But therapists don’t have training in environmental issues, and no evidence-tested treatments exist yet, which means most therapists are just winging it. Traditional therapy, too, may not be effective—climate change affects everyone and everything, not just the single individual seeking help, which challenges some of the common practices in the field. In this piece, Jarvis offers an interesting look at the relatively new field of climate psychology.
Over and over, he read the same story, of potential patients who’d gone looking for someone to talk to about climate change and other environmental crises, only to be told that they were overreacting — that their concern, and not the climate, was what was out of whack and in need of treatment. (This was a story common enough to have become a joke, another therapist told me: “You come in and talk about how anxious you are that fossil-fuel companies continue to pump CO2 into the air, and your therapist says, ‘So, tell me about your mother.’”)
The traditional focus of his field, Bryant said, could be oversimplified as “fixing the individual”: treating patients as separate entities working on their personal growth. 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. It sometimes felt like a direct challenge to old therapeutic paradigms — and perhaps a chance to replace them with something better.
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