Therapists Are Reckoning with Eco-anxiety
With no training, counselors feel unequipped to handle the growing number of people anxious about the climate emergency
April 19, 2021
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Andrew Bryant, a therapist based in Tacoma, Washington, felt helpless the first time climate change came up in his office. It was 2016, and a client was agonizing over whether to have a baby. His partner wanted one, but the young man couldn’t stop envisioning this hypothetical child growing up in an apocalyptic, climate-changed world.
Bryant was used to guiding people through their relationship conflicts, anxieties about the future, and life-changing decisions. But this felt different personal. Bryant had long felt concerned about climate change, but in a distant, theoretical way. The patient’s despair faced him with an entirely new reality: that climate change would directly impact his life and the lives of future generations.
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Therapists Are Seeing More Patients Struggle With Climate Anxiety
Mental health professionals are developing a new standard of mental health care for our climate-changed world.
Luis Alvarez via Getty Images
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This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.
Andrew Bryant, a therapist based in Tacoma, Washington, felt helpless the first time climate change came up in his office. It was 2016, and a client was agonizing over whether to have a baby. His partner wanted one, but the young man couldn’t stop envisioning this hypothetical child growing up in an apocalyptic, climate-changed world.
Editor s note: This story originally appeared in Gizmodo and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.
Andrew Bryant, a therapist based in Tacoma, Washington, felt helpless the first time climate change came up in his office. It was 2016, and a client was agonizing over whether to have a baby. His partner wanted one, but the young man couldn t stop envisioning this hypothetical child growing up in an apocalyptic, climate-changed world.
Bryant was used to guiding people through their relationship conflicts, anxieties about the future, and life-changing decisions. But this felt different personal. Bryant had long felt concerned about climate change, but in a distant, theoretical way. The patient s despair faced him with an entirely new reality: that climate change would directly impact his life and the lives of future generations.
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Underlining the need for education, Facebook recently conducted a survey in more than 30 countries, in partnership with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, which revealed that more than three-quarters of people now believe that climate change is happening, but fewer understand it is caused mostly by human activities .