Climate, Psychology and Change: Psychotherapy in a Time When the Familiar is Dying

As humanity is facing a climate emergency, mental health professionals have entered uncharted territory. There is no blueprint for how the psycho-social profession is supposed to meet the fact that the continuation of human and more than human life on Earth is endangered by Western lifestyles. Nobody can figure out on their own how therapists should respond in a time when the familiar no longer provides all the answers.

Bringing together the voices of senior psychotherapists from around the world, this volume reflects on the ways in which the psychotherapy profession needs to widen its thinking and practice in order to be able to respond to the complex, interconnected challenges of our time. Because climate change represents a superordinate form of trauma that is triggering all other forms of unresolved, personal, inter-generational and cultural traumas, we are effectively given no option but to fundamentally re-arrange our perception of what it means to be human in an inter-connected, living world.

This book explores the need for the decolonisation of the mental health profession, notions of environmental justice, biospheric trauma, and anthropocentrism, and invites the reader to examine their own responses and contributions towards a collaborative exploration of what the mental health professions have to offer at this threshold moment for humanity’s future.