This book introduces readers to the known psychological aspects of climate change as a pressing global concern and explores how it is relevant to current and future clinical practice.

Arguing that it is vital for ecological concerns to enter the therapy room, this book calls for change from regulatory bodies, training institutes, and individual practitioners. The book includes original thinking and research by practitioners from a range of perspectives, including psychodynamic, eco-systemic and integrative. It considers how our different modalities and ways of working need to be adapted to be applicable to the ecological crises. Chapters deal with topics from climate science, including the emotional and mental health impacts of climate breakdown, professional ethics, and wider systemic understandings of current therapeutic approaches. Also discussed are the practice-based implications of becoming a climate-aware therapist, eco-psychosocial approaches, and the inextricable links between the climate crises and racism, colonialism, and social injustice. Throughout the book voices of non-practitioners are featured sharing their experience of the climate crisis and how they see the role of therapy in it.

Being a Therapist in a Time of Climate Breakdown will enable therapists and mental health professionals across a range of modalities to engage with their own thoughts and feelings about climate breakdown and consider how it both changes and reinforces aspects of their therapeutic work.