The Guardian newspaper reported last week on the release of an Imperial College London briefing paper report on the impact of climate breakdown on distress (1,2). The Association of Clinical Psychologists UK welcomes this recognition of the profound impact of climate change on all aspects of our wellbeing. Loss of safety and security in our housing, livelihoods, communities, environments and futures, such as that created by changing weather patterns, is known to result in a whole range of emotional difficulties. This may lead to additional mental health presentations, but we must avoid suggesting that the anguish, despair, rage and terror caused by the direct or feared impacts of the climate and ecological crisis reflect ‘mental health’ problems. Instead, we need to seek to make sense of distress in ways that recognise the impact of the crisis on the ability of individuals and communities to meet their basic human needs, and adjust to the impact of forced displacement, genocide, food insecurity and conflict (3). Although terms such as ‘climate anxiety’ and ‘eco-grief’ might seem to helpfully summarise the mental health implications of the climate crisis, they risk treating these as individual difficulties to overcome rather than a collective response to a threat that needs addressing (4). We must promote the importance of making sense of individual and community reactions in ways that attend to how the climate end ecological crisis is intertwined with other social justice issues such as inequality and racism, resulting in those least responsible being most affected (5,6,7).

The only long-term solution is to join together to tackle the biggest crisis of our age, and turn fear into shared action on the climate and ecological emergency. Health professionals must recognise this growing source of distress across whole populations. The ultimate answers lie not in new mental health treatments or an expansion of existing services, but in collective responses to collective distress because of the climate and ecological emergency (8). Drastic and rapid political, social and economic reforms are needed to limit the damage that will be caused this century (9,10). Recognised for what it is, and responded to appropriately, understandable fear about climate breakdown can be transformed into shared community action. The HCPC ‘standards of conduct, performance and ethics’, which we need to adhere to as registered health professionals, state that we must take “all reasonable steps to reduce the risk of harm to service users, carers and colleagues as far as possible” (11).  Thus, in keeping with the ACP-UK position statement ‘on the need to take action to address the climate crisis’(12), we believe that promoting social action of this kind should be seen as part of our professional role. We need to move beyond the therapy room and use our skills to influence the social and political changes we so desperately need in the face of this catastrophic threat to our way of life and our planet.

Elanor Lewis-Holmes, ACP-UK Climate Action Network,
Lucy Johnstone, ACP-UK member,
Gareth Morgan, ACP Climate Action Network,
Tori Snell, ACP-UK Joint Director for England & ACP-UK Climate Action Network,
Mike Wang, Chair of ACP-UK Board

References

1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/26/climate-crisis-inflicting-huge-hidden-costs-mental-health
2. https://tinyurl.com/3pep89mv
3. Barnwell, G.,Stroud, L., & Watson, M. (2020) Critical reflections from South Africa: Using the Power Threat Meaning Framework to place climate-related distress in its socio-political context. Clinical Psychology Forum, 332, August 2020
4. https://www.climatepsychologyalliance.org/handbook/451-eco-anxiety
5. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep20281
6. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-climate-anxiety/
7. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/climate-justice/
8. https://www.climatepsychologyalliance.org/handbook/451-eco-anxiety
9. https://www.unep.org/emissions-gap-report-2020
10. https://tinyurl.com/2x4swjcn
11. https://www.hcpc-uk.org/standards/standards-of-conduct-performance-and-ethics/
12. https://acpuk.org.uk/climate_change_statement/