You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Heat increases suicide risk, violence, and delirium and is particularly harmful to people with dementia, alcohol and drug dependence, and psychosis; floods cause PTSD and depression; extreme weather events and displacement have devastating physical and mental consequences, and pollution has been linked to every known disease. The climate crisis is a health crisis, a mental health crisis and a social crisis, with differential effects on minoritised, racialised, impoverished communities and people with disabilities: both an existential risk to all life on Earth and a hyperobject, difficult in its complexity for the human mind to grasp and process. The authors of successive Lancet Countdowns on Climate Change and reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have meticulously catalogued human suffering, present and future, over decades (Reports – IPCC, 2023, Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, Romanello et al., 2025). We continue to condone an economic system that values fossil fuel profits over life on Earth. Culture, politics, society and relationships are implicated. The climate crisis also overwhelms our social climate, the one in which human decency and goodness (or their opposite) can be encouraged to flourish.
It feels important to ask – as Peter Kalmus, NASA scientist and climate activist does in the opening chapter of Being a Therapist in a Time of Climate Breakdown – if denial is the reason we have not entered crisis mode. That, and a multi-billion dollar industry of disinformation and the corruption of our politicians. The psychologically trained and minded have a valuable contribution to make to help usher our societies gently into crisis mode, through grief and past denial.
Being a Therapist does exactly that and more. It’s an expansive and apposite anthology from 23 authors brought together by the Climate Psychology Alliance, whose self-declared role from inception in 2011 has been both to support the ‘collapse aware’ and to enable cli