This episode explores the connection between climate change and mental health in a conversation with Maia Kiley, a therapist practicing climate aware therapy and eco-therapy. We discuss eco-anxiety, climate distress, emotional resilience, climate doomism & optimism, and the accessibility of mental health resources.
This episode explores the connection between climate change and mental health in a conversation with Maia Kiley, a therapist practicing climate aware therapy and eco-therapy. We discuss eco-anxiety, climate distress, emotional resilience, climate doomism & optimism, and the accessibility of mental health resources.
Connect with Maia:
Resources:
The Waggle | Project Regeneration
A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety by Sarah Jaquette Ray
How to Prepare for Climate Change by David Pogue
Generation Dread by Britt Wray
It's Not Just You | Book by Tori Tsui
Sources:
New report shows just 100 companies are source of over 70% of emissions - CDP
CWS Data Tool: Demographics of the U.S. Psychology Workforce
Access to Care Data 2022 | Mental Health America
Credits:
Hosted and produced by Kiana Michaan
Edited and co-produced by Lucy Little
Maia Kiley: [00:00:00] Sort of address overwhelm and burnout, especially like with people who work in the field of climate, I think that's a huge one. Knowing your limits, knowing what specifically drains your energy, how you gain your energy, and making sure you're like building this toolkit of how to continuously regenerate and nourish yourself, because that's really the only way to be available to your community and to the planet.
Kiana: Hello, and welcome to Climate with Kiana, a podcast that explores topics of climate, energy, and sustainability through a framework of joy and justice. I'm your host, Kiana Michaan, a climate justice and clean energy advocate. This show brings you conversations with passionate people working in climate. And together we explore the many exciting and intersectional solutions to one of the greatest challenges of our time.
So if you've ever felt [00:01:00] overwhelmed by the climate crisis, these conversations are for you. Whether you're already a climate nerd or just climate curious, join me each week in an exploration of climate justice solutions. Let's cultivate hope and joy and vision new possibilities together.
Hello all and welcome back. Today we are talking about the impact of climate change on mental health. The psychological impacts from climate change are significant, and the current and impending impacts of the climate crisis are causing a range of emotions, from anxiety and dread to hope and motivation.
In the book Generation Dread, Britt Ray says, "Coping with climate anxiety is an ongoing process. We toggle between distress over difficult information and states of resilience." How can we navigate our many climate [00:02:00] emotions? How do we mentally and emotionally process the climate crisis? Why are our brains easily numb to the scope of our climate grief?
What are some tools we can use to work with our climate emotions? To dig into these questions and more, I reached out to Maya Kiley, a therapist specializing in climate aware therapy. Here's our conversation.
Maia Kiley: Yeah, so I'm here in Brooklyn as well, and I'm a licensed psychotherapist, certified ecotherapist, which is It's nature based healing, and as a member of the Climate Psychology Alliance, I provide climate aware therapy, which is really just focusing on climate distress, and also provide community events here as well in Brooklyn.
Kiana: The intersection of psychology and mental health and Climate, nature has been around for a while, but is continuing to emerge and grow as [00:03:00] these needs become more and more pertinent in these times we're living in. So what is ecotherapy and nature based therapy? And how did you come to this important work?
Maia Kiley: Yeah, exactly. So ecotherapy is basically an umbrella term for a nature based approach to mental health. So this can include, like you've probably heard of like nature, like wilderness therapy, equine therapy with horses, forest bathing. It's really this umbrella term that can include all these different types of nature based therapy.
But it's really being in nature with the intention of healing, of growth. And I think of traditional therapy as really guiding and teaching us to like resource from ourself or from our relationships with other people. And I think of ecotherapy as expanding so that we can resource [00:04:00] beyond humans to really have nature as like part of our support network.
Um, so it's really this practice of nurturing a deep. Connection to your inner nature and to earth. And it may even include these very specific applied nature based exercises. It's really this general term. It's very like niche still, like people are really. Developing what that sort of looks like and what they're going to be offering.
Kiana: To provide some more context briefly, ecotherapy practices are just some of the many tools that can be used in climate aware therapy. For more information, you can visit resources such as the Climate Psychology Alliance. So with that said, climate change, it's a massive, a massive issue. We're, you know, living in the midst of very unique and challenging times, I think on so many levels.
The matter of the fact is that climate change is. It's very difficult for our brains to process [00:05:00] psychologically for many reasons. So I would love you to speak to why climate change is so difficult for us to process mentally and emotionally and how that's collectively impacting our mental health.
Maia Kiley: I mean, I think on a basic level, just because it's so large and it's so existential and it's so overwhelming.
And people have the trauma response to it. So they may go into fight or flight mode or just shut down or numbing out. And I think it's also difficult because it's something that challenges our individualistic, dualistic systems. And so in this way, I also see it as almost like a spiritual crisis to like crisis of how we're going to relate to each other and the earth.
Yeah, I think that's on a basic level why it's so, so challenging.
Kiana: The climate crisis challenges our identities as individuals and [00:06:00] collectively, which can be spiritually confronting. If you've ever felt numb to the wide breadth of emotions you may feel in response to the climate crisis, you are not alone.
In her book Generation Dread, climate psychology researcher Britt Rae shares, Most of us don't deeply engage with the reality of the climate crisis. Not because we don't care, but because it's painful. We're just so deeply caught in the double blind that we become immobilized. The experience of climate grief and distress has become increasingly prevalent.
There is more terminology than ever before to describe the growing connections between climate change, emotions, and mental health. Phrases such as eco anxiety and climate grief have become firmly a part of the climate conversation. I asked Maya to talk about these a bit more and how these terms are being used to discuss the various emotional responses we're having to the climate crisis.
Maia Kiley: So climate distress is again, sort of like the umbrella term and [00:07:00] eco anxiety or grief or all these climate feelings would go underneath that. And climate distress is just the way that we feel and are impacted by the climate and ecological crisis and destruction. So it's various like psychological, emotional, and like physical responses that we have.
To what's happening, and I think basically what I've seen in the people that I work with is that we're all sort of falling underneath some stage of grief and those stages of grief were outlined by Elizabeth Kubler Ross. And they were, like, originally outlined to look at the stages of grief when you lose a loved one.
Kiana: Elizabeth Kubler Ross, who Maya is referring to, was a Swiss American psychiatrist who's known in part for her 1969 book, On Death and Dying, and developed the theory of the five stages of grief.
Maia Kiley: But I think it's really important to expand that out to, like, the loss of [00:08:00] What we love in terms of the earth.
And so most people may know, but the stages are like denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and then acceptance. And of course those stages aren't linear. So we cycle through them. And that's when we see like people who have maybe woken up to what's going on. And also the like different systems of oppression and everything.
They get very angry because they're like seeing what's really going on. So then. There's people who are like in the anger and there's people who are in the shutdown, like the depression, they're just hopeless. It's over. It's too late. And in some ways we can look at like all of that as a, as like a, a stage of grief and that we may even shift through those different stages.
So most people kind of experience anxiety or panic or fear, anger, despair, helplessness, hopelessness. So all of that would be categorized as climate feelings, [00:09:00] but I still see those as generally falling into some. At one of these stages of grief.
Kiana: Yes, I think there can oftentimes be a bit of like a myth of collective apathy, but the fact that we have at this point separate terminology for these emotions, and we're not just calling it, Oh, grief or despair, hopelessness around this speaks to the magnitude of the intersection of kind of the emotional crisis that is congruent with the climate crisis.
that it truly needs its own terminology and category. Yeah, I was curious, you mentioned that when you first were drawn to, to ecotherapy, you were immediately interested. Do you feel that you had already experienced kind of climate emotions prior to getting into this work? Or did coming into this work help you to get in touch with and maybe process some climate emotions that you hadn't thought about as deeply before?
Maia Kiley: I think [00:10:00] I felt. A lot of distress and confusion as a child about that. So I think I had been on my own journey with it for a long time. And those conversations were like something that was like available to me, starting pretty young, which I'm very grateful for. Cause I think the more that we've been able to feel and talk about these things, the more we have like.
Capacity to support other people when they maybe are realizing it or experiencing it like for the first time.
Kiana: And being able to share those experiences are so important to to processing it. But, yeah, I think most people experience some level of these emotions, but oftentimes are paralyzed or frozen by the anxiety, fear and grief and don't know how to move through it or don't know how to talk about it with others, which is why it's.
I think even more important to have these conversations because I think we're really not alone in these feelings and processing them. Maya shared with me that her [00:11:00] mom actually spoke with her about climate change when she was very young, which was a lot for her to process emotionally at the time. I remember my own experience of learning about climate science for the first time, and how it was a lot to process emotionally.
Today, more and more young people are feeling the emotional gravity and understand what is at stake, which has led to an increasingly robust youth climate activism movement globally. So we've seen, we've seen a lot of youth climate activists who've done amazing work, and the reason they're called to that work is because they are learning about it super young, and then actually be able to move through those emotions enough to spark action, which can be challenging to be able to get all the way to that action step, especially at a young age.
But at the same time, I feel like there's this collective narrative around putting a lot of Pressure and responsibility on the younger generations to fix the problems. I mean, I think I experienced in school and I think perhaps people can relate [00:12:00] to this, that feeling of like, all right, they're teaching you about the earth and climate and they're like, great.
Now you fix this when, which is just like a very emotionally taxing on younger people when realistically. It's the older generations who are still in power. It's specifically like governments and fossil fuel companies and industry. Concern about climate change is higher in younger generations with good reason.
In fact, 67 percent of Gen Z and 71 percent of millennials consider climate a top concern, compared to 63 percent of Gen X and just 57 percent of boomers and older. With a 1. 5 degrees warming scenario, children today will experience a four fold increase in extreme weather events over their lifetimes. By the end of the century, the amount of the global population exposed to deadly heat stress will increase from 30 percent to between 50 and 76%.
Overall, younger people and future generations will [00:13:00] experience a mirrored of worsening climate impacts over the decades to come. These projections cause understandable climate distress and anxiety and highlight the importance of prioritizing intergenerational equity.
Maia Kiley: I agree with you and I think it's like, this is such a huge opportunity for everyone to come together and work together, right, to break down these systems, but that doesn't mean Certain people and groups aren't, like, way more accountable and responsible.
Kiana: In fact, just 100 fossil fuel companies are responsible for 71 percent of global emissions since 1988, which is the year that climate change was officially recognized and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established. 59 percent of those companies are state owned, meaning that many governments are also responsible.
Primarily governments in developed countries. And I'm curious in your experience, in your practice, how you see these overarching frameworks of kind of climate optimism, [00:14:00] climate doomism, impacting people, which I think is very much driven by media and stories we, we read or consume and in various sources, such as the way like reading about the climate news really Impacts us all and I think finding climate stories that are more uplifting can be more of a challenge in that it's not always the most easily accessible.
Maia Kiley: Yeah, I feel like storytelling and media and a vision of What we're working toward or what a healthier society and earth would look like is so essential. And as a therapist, working with clients who want to make a change, like we all know that on a personal level, often you have to re pattern yourself or to manifest something, to create something new.
You have to have a sense of what that is and start to vision it. And that's That vision and that clarity and those [00:15:00] stories, those new stories and narratives about yourself are what pull you into change. So, of course, it's the same collectively, and I Totally agree with you, Canada, like it's really hard to come by those stories and, um, images and visions.
And, you know, I think those of us who are like in the climate circles, it's maybe a little more available, but to the general public, it's really difficult to access that. And I think the media is really doing a disservice by basically not telling the stories that are in process of all the incredible people and.
Organizations and groups that are working for this other way of being and that are already in some ways like living it. We have examples, we have solutions. And in terms of climate optimism and climate doomism, yeah, I think it's really, it's important to be like cautious of going on one extreme or the other.
Really like finding balance in the middle, like where you are awake to the [00:16:00] crisis, fully understanding the severity of it, but being able to manage a fight or flight response and being able to be very supported in that and to be in a space of. So awake, but also hopeful and hope is different than optimism in that it's not saying I'm sure everything's going to be great, but it's really like I'm going to act anyway and I'm going to work toward what I know is Just and healthy, regardless of exactly how the outcome is, or even if I don't get to see the outcome. So I think it's important to be balanced with that.
Kiana: I would love to hear some other tools and practices, exercises you mentioned before that you use. with your clients, with yourself, and that people can use to help work through climate [00:17:00] emotions. Meditation and visualization are powerful tools for grounding and being with our climate emotions.
Check out Maya's meditations on her website. As referenced in the episode description.
Maia Kiley: Yeah. So the first I would say is really starting to face and identify your feelings because it's really hard to get into a place of any kind of aligned action without really facing those feelings and giving them space and like composting them, allowing them to be, and potentially.
Shift into something else. And of course, if our feelings aren't phased and processed, they can get stuck. And that's when we get depressed. So important to find spaces and later we'll, I'll share some resources, but like spaces where, where you can go and talk about how you're feeling with people who are open and facing this crisis as well, um, I work with.
Um, my climate distress clients with mindset and narratives really [00:18:00] looking at their stories and really choosing a story and a narrative that allows you to engage your authentic power. Because I think. A lot of these systems aren't working, this capitalistic patriarchal system is about really stripping power from people.
And so I think it's really important to remember that we do have power and we can engage our specific, authentic, healthy power. And that includes how we want to act in this movement. So I work with people on their mindset and narrative, then of course the visioning piece. Okay, if you are very clear on everything that you don't like about what's going on, um, and everything that's going wrong, like, are you clear on what you do want, what you're working toward here, what you're Vision is what you would like.
I work with people in terms of building a climate resilience toolkit. And that includes really taking care of your physical [00:19:00] being and being embodied. Being by that, I mean, like balancing your time in your mind with your time, like in your body and movement and your senses, let's see, and then like ways to.
Sort of address overwhelm and burnout, especially like with people who work in the field of climate. I think that's a huge one, knowing your limits, knowing what specifically drains your energy, what, how you gain your energy and. Making sure you're like building this toolkit of how to continuously regenerate and nourish yourself.
Because that's really the only way to be available to your community and to the planet. Yeah, and then a big piece is that community piece. We have to live and embody this healthier Earth that we want. And that includes, yeah, really being available to community and collaboration.
Kiana: This idea that like, what is our inner climate in addition to like the climate of the Earth?
And [00:20:00] if we don't have that kind of stability and resilience there, that we can't bring our best selves to climate work. Which is why I think also there is, is so much burnout and exhaustion in, in climate professionals because people come to this work caring so deeply and wanting to put their whole selves in it and doing so and then getting exhausted.
So finding those kind of sustainable practices that allow you to give your best to the movement, but also give to yourself. And I also think like the body and the earth being like interesting metaphors, like when we think about our own health and the health of the earth. What you do now to take care of your body has tremendous impact years in the future and the same for the earth.
And if you just continue to address the symptoms and suppress symptoms without addressing the root cause, that doesn't address the issues. [00:21:00] So I really just see a lot of parallels between how we care for our own like physical health and well being and like also what that means in terms of how we're addressing the health of the planet.
So I think that embodied piece of like how innately connected we are to nature is really key. Caring for ourselves through radical self care is important to be able to bring oneself fully to climate work, both through individual and collective action. No one individual needs to have kind of that level of the weight of the world on their, their shoulders in terms of feeling responsibility for fixing this mess we're in and finding those sustainable practices so that you can continue the work.
I think that said, I definitely feel that finding that balance between doing and being, I think is really, meaningful to connecting with oneself and nature. I think also a lot of people want to be [00:22:00] contributing and helping to climate solutions, but don't have the time or space in their lives with their responsibilities.
So thinking about the fact that self care can be an active resistance and I do believe that you can connect climate solutions to almost anything, no matter your, your skill set or interests, because we're all in the environment and it intersects with everything. Something else I wanted to discuss was the issues of equity and access when it comes to therapy, and also when it comes to nature, considering how it intersects in your work.
Therapy is not accessible to everyone. It's becoming more, which is, I would say in recent years, which is great. There's less. stigmatization around it than there used to be, which is really wonderful to see. There's definitely more diversity needed. And in, in a similar vein, having access to nature is also very much an equity and justice issue.
So thinking about. I'm curious how duly how both then the intersection of those [00:23:00] issues results in higher mental health burdens on marginalized communities who might have less access to nature, which is really helpful for your own processing and less access to mental health professionals. Yeah, I just curious how in your work, how you've encountered these issues of access and equity and just your thoughts on it.
Maia Kiley: Absolutely. I think it's frustrating because The psychology world, the therapy field is still part of this medical system. And that's really, it's really challenging to be part of that. You know, it's still really difficult to have access in that system. There's a lot of these. Maybe more large like tech companies too that are trying to make it, therapy more accessible and that's really excellent.
But also those companies are still these like companies where the people at the top, they're making most of the money and it's accessible, but it's also like at the expense of [00:24:00] therapists or they're paying them like so much less. So I still don't feel like there is a solution that works in terms of being accessible to people.
And. Being sustainable for the therapists and it's a huge problem. I think in my own practice, yeah, this has absolutely come up and it's why I basically just offer community events. I want it to be more accessible and I have offered also free therapy to, to, to some people who don't have the resources.
Kiana: It's a lot, a lot of work to be done in terms of just transforming the system also that provides care in a way that reaches people more, more effectively and their needs.
According to the American Psychology Association, in 2021, the psychology U. S. workforce was 80 percent white. Over 27 million individuals experiencing a mental health illness in the U. S. do not receive [00:25:00] treatment.
Yeah. So I wanted to ask about the importance of. One's relationship with nature and the land and how you see that in your practice working with clients, how these themes come up in your experience, how your relationship with nature has impacted your approach to this work.
Maia Kiley: I think what I've noticed is that a lot of people, perhaps more like the younger generations, are feeling really unrooted and not sure where they belong.
And I think that in terms of feeling a sense of rootedness and belonging on the planet right now, like to feel grounded is to like participate in creating your own belonging through your relationship to like where you are, even if there isn't a lot of nature around, just. Some kind of sense of that specific place and appreciation for that place.
And that can be very [00:26:00] like simple too, of just connecting with nature or the land or the place that you're in. So really as this foundation for mental health and yeah, on a personal level, I just, that's what I think of instead of like, how far can I like travel and how many things can I see? It's like, how connected can I get locally?
Like walking distance, biking distance, and how can I notice more and more around me? And how can I love this place more and more? And, um, even doing some sort of ecotherapy techniques for like, um, I have some. Practices of just introducing yourself to the land, like starting to dialogue with the place that you're in and that belonging isn't just like you're going around searching for where you belong socially or, or location wise, but something that you're actively participating in by how available you are to a place and the trees and how available you are to the people in your community.
So you are creating. [00:27:00] Belonging and rootedness. And I think that's really foundational right now because it is scary. And I think a lot of young people feel that, I mean, everyone, but especially young people like, Oh my God, if I live there, what if there's flooding? And, you know, there's like this, like, where do I go feeling?
And so it's like really foundational to develop this personal relationship to nature and land that even if you are going to move, allows you to have a sense of rootedness and participation in life right now.
Kiana: And I think, ultimately, we have to feel that inner belonging, no matter where we are, because the outside world will never remain exactly the same.
And the landscapes are continuing to change even more. And I think, to your point, like, nowhere, geographically, is spared from these impacts. It's being felt. everywhere, but also like recognizing that most people don't have the option necessarily to pick up and leave their [00:28:00] communities when there is environmental distress and disasters.
And so those relationships we build in our communities are so important too, because as we're then experiencing these things collectively to have that. Local community to be there to support, um, that might come to mind, but I think there's just so much that can be said about community building around nature in the urban environment and how communities come together to protect the small amounts of nature and green spaces that we do have, which makes them almost more, more meaningful when you're not like surrounded by the more trees in your neighborhood that has Tremendous impacts on both like physical and mental health, so really important.
As we wrapped up our conversation about climate and mental health, I asked Maya about the role of hope and joy in her work and what she is visioning for the future.
Maia Kiley: Yeah, I'd say my clients definitely and the people who participate in my [00:29:00] community events give me a lot of hope and I just feel so grateful to know.
So many amazing people and organizations and groups that are working for a healthy earth. And also I think in terms of my clients seeing the power of personal transformation and how rapid that can be when someone is ready and takes responsibility. So it's, Oh my gosh, if that's possible, it's possible on a collective level.
And I don't know if we'll do that or when we'll do that, but I do know that. Like, we have this opportunity to do that right now, and I do feel that it's, like, possible. Like, I, I feel that possibility. And my vision of a regenerative Earth gives me a lot of hope, and so does just being in nature and just the beauty of it and the way that nature transforms and shifts and, like, adapts.
I feel like. Pretty [00:30:00] inspired. By meeting with clients every day, just the beautiful conversations, the courage and willingness of people to look at themselves. I'm probably most inspired right now by like earth based spirituality, by the moon circles. And again, I know that can, it can be hard to have access to or know what's going on when the media is really not presenting those stories and processes.
But I'm really inspired by the Climate Psychology Alliance and by the group Women and Climate that I'm part of here. New York. So just like these groups of people who are care so much.
Kiana: As we near the end of the conversation and exploration, Maya shared some more resources on climate and mental health.
There are actually a lot of different resources around this topic that can help. Here are a few that Maya shared toward the end of our conversation.
Maia Kiley: I think some resources for anybody who wants it, I guess journalism, if people are looking for something like the Project Regeneration has [00:31:00] this newsletter called The Waggle that I feel like is, I recommend all on regenerative things that are happening.
Just a book that I'm reading right now, which I'm really enjoying is Not Too Late by Rebecca Solnit. There's a book called A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety and also How to Prepare for Climate Change. But also, you know, if people are looking for like a group where they can express themselves and that is free, the Good Grief Network and the Climate Psychology Alliance has.
Some climate cafes. So those are available to people. So Good Grief Network and Climate Psychology Alliance Climate Cafes. Those are great spaces to begin with and to feel that you're held in what you're experiencing.
Kiana: Yeah, thank you for sharing. And thank you so much for being here, Maya. It's been such a pleasure speaking with you.
Maia Kiley: So wonderful to speak with you.[00:32:00]
Kiana: Thank you for listening. Climate with Kiana is hosted and produced by me, Kiana Michaan. This episode was co produced and edited by Lucy Little. Theme music by Colette Michaan. This podcast is recorded and produced in New York City on unceded Munsee Lenape land. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with a friend, leave a comment, and subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts.
For more information about the guests and topics discussed, please visit climatewithkiana. com.