Pirate's Cove

Perhaps they should seek out a qualified mental health professional who hasn’t been captured by a doomsday cult?

Climate Change Is Keeping Therapists Up at Night

Andrew Bryant can still remember when he thought of climate change as primarily a problem of the future. When he heard or read about troubling impacts, he found himself setting them in 2080, a year that, not so coincidentally, would be a century after his own birth. The changing climate, and all the challenges it would bring, were “scary and sad,” he said recently, “but so far in the future that I’d be safe.”

That was back when things were different, in the long-ago world of 2014 or so. The Pacific Northwest, where Bryant is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist treating patients in private practice in Seattle, is a largely affluent place that was once considered a potential refuge from climate disruption. Climate change sometimes came up in therapy sessions in the context of other issues — say, a couple having arguments because they couldn’t decide if it was still ethical to have kids — but it was rare, and usually fairly theoretical. “We’re lucky to be buffered by wealth and location,” Bryant said. “We are lucky to have the opportunity to look away.” (snip)

Now lots of Bryant’s clients wanted to talk about climate change. They wanted to talk about how strange and disorienting and scary this new reality felt, about what the future might be like and how they might face it, about how to deal with all the strong feelings — helplessness, rage, depression, guilt — being stirred up inside them.

Yeah, it’s most an uber-white Leftist thing. Most “minorities” (leftists think blacks in Africa, Asians in Asia, and Latinos in South America are “minorities”) just want that sweet, sweet climate cash

Bryant immersed himself in the subject, joining and founding associations of climate-concerned therapists. The Pacific Northwest, after all, was hardly alone in seeing scary new impacts, and lots of places were experiencing far worse. He searched for emerging research on the intersection of climate change and psychology, which was scattered across a variety of fields and journals, and eventually started a website, Climate & Mind, to serve as a sort of clearing house for other therapists searching for resources. Instead, the site became an unexpected window into the experience of would-be patients: Bryant found himself receiving messages from people around the world who stumbled across it while looking for help.

Perhaps he and the others should be telling their patients to just chill, everything is fine, Doom is not coming.

It had been a challenging few years, Bryant told me when I first called to talk about his work. There were some ways in which climate fears were a natural fit in the therapy room, and he believed the field had coalesced around some answers that felt clear and useful. But treating those fears also stirred up lots of complicated questions that no one was quite sure how to answer. 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.

So, crazy people being exposed to malpractice.

Rebecca Weston, a licensed clinical social worker practicing in New York and a co-president of the CPA-NA, told me that when she treats anxiety disorders, her goal is often to help the patient understand how much of their fear is internally produced — out of proportion to the reality they’re facing. But climate anxiety is a different challenge, because people worried about climate change and environmental breakdown are often having the opposite experience: Their worries are rational and evidence-based, but they feel isolated and frustrated because they’re living in a society that tends to dismiss them.

It’s all crazy. At least the wackos in Scientology leave everyone else alone. Heck, they, and ever crazier cults, seem better adjusted than the Cult of Climastrology.

It is a very, very long piece, full of Crazy.