Do Mental Health Professionals Have a Role in Environmental Health?
The implicit belief within mental health professions seems to be that environmental issues, while perhaps worthy of other professional's attention, are not our domain. Certainly, there are few enough ecotherapy agencies that most readers will never have heard of one. There are no existing DSM diagnostic categories such as nature deficit disorder. In more psychoanalytic circles, the most frequent reference to environment is to the early maternal environment or to the therapist creating an empathic environment. Some of us have heard of ecopsychology, but we might not know what it is, and are very unlikely to know how to apply it. The answer seems clear that the environment is simply not our business.
From an environmental perspective, however, this answer seems dangerously similar to frequent claims in regard to climate change, that this is the responsibility of someone else - a more polluting nation, a more or less developed nation, a scientist, a politician, the public, practically anyone else. Leading thinkers and scientists on climate change have weighed in and said that the solution is not the next piece of technology on the horizon, or for politicians to start serving something other than their own short term interests. Instead our hope is through changing our whole way of relating to and talking about this essential thing that we are part of, that we completely depend on, and that we call our environment.
We're beginning to scientifically understand the psychological and physical benefits of nature, and impacts of loss of nature. Psychotherapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, counsellors, and social workers can now step in to contribute by doing what we do - taking theory and insight and making it personal with the groups and individuals who we see daily.
From an environmental perspective, however, this answer seems dangerously similar to frequent claims in regard to climate change, that this is the responsibility of someone else - a more polluting nation, a more or less developed nation, a scientist, a politician, the public, practically anyone else. Leading thinkers and scientists on climate change have weighed in and said that the solution is not the next piece of technology on the horizon, or for politicians to start serving something other than their own short term interests. Instead our hope is through changing our whole way of relating to and talking about this essential thing that we are part of, that we completely depend on, and that we call our environment.
We're beginning to scientifically understand the psychological and physical benefits of nature, and impacts of loss of nature. Psychotherapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, counsellors, and social workers can now step in to contribute by doing what we do - taking theory and insight and making it personal with the groups and individuals who we see daily.
But My Clients Never Mention Environmental Issues!
Unless we are seeing a environmentally engaged client with the specific agenda of discussing environmental impact, it is unlikely that our clients will spontaneously tell us about their feelings about environmental issues. It would be easy to take this at face value - to assume that the vast majority of people are simply not impacted by the state of our planet and our future. This would ignore the fact that as mental health professionals we profoundly influence what our clients bring up with us. Our clients know that we think about health largely in an individual, or interpersonal way, and they intuit that we wouldn't know what to do with their environmental fear, grief, or anger, if they brought it to us. How and why to bring up the environment during the course of therapy, is a big topic in of itself, but suffice to say for the moment, that our job is to have the difficult conversations with our clients rather than to avoid them.
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