Being a Therapist in a Time of Climate Breakdown

This book introduces readers to the known psychological aspects of climate change as a pressing global concern and explores how they are relevant to current and future clinical practice.

Arguing that it is vital for ecological concerns to enter the therapy room, this book calls for change from regulatory bodies, training institutes and individual practitioners. The book includes original thinking and research by practitioners from a range of perspectives, including psychodynamic, eco-systemic and integrative. It considers how our different modalities and ways of working need to be adapted to be applicable to the ecological crises. It includes Voices from people who are not practitioners about their experience including how they see the role of therapy. Chapters deal with topics from climate science, including the emotional and mental health impacts of climate breakdown, professional ethics and wider systemic understandings of current therapeutic approaches. Also discussed are the practice-based implications of becoming a climate-aware therapist, eco-psychosocial approaches and the inextricable links between the climate crises and racism, colonialism and social injustice.

Being a Therapist in a Time of Climate Breakdown will enable therapists and mental health professionals across a range of modalities to engage with their own thoughts and feelings about climate breakdown and consider how it both changes and reinforces aspects of their therapeutic work.

Judith Anderson is a Jungian psychotherapist and psychiatrist.

Tree Staunton is a UKCP Honorary Fellow and a Registered Body Psychotherapist, Supervisor and Trainer.

Jenny O’Gorman is a queer, disabled Psychodynamic Counsellor, writer and activist.

Caroline Hickman is a psychotherapist in clinical practice and lecturer at the University of Bath.