Last fall, Ms. Black logged in for her first meeting with Dr. Doherty, who was on video for a big, glossy shot of evergreens.
At 56, he is one of the most visible authorities on climate in psychotherapy, and hosts a podcast, “Climate Change and Happiness.” In his clinical practice, he extends beyond standard treatments for anxiety, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, to more obscure ones, such as existential therapy, designed to help people fight despair, and ecotherapy, which examines the client’s relationship with the natural world.
He did not take the usual path to psychology; after graduating from Columbia University, he hitchhiked across the country to work on fishing boats in Alaska, then as a whitewater rafting guide – “the whole Jack London thing” – and as a fundraiser for Greenpeace. Entering graduate school in his thirties, he naturally fell into the discipline of “ecopsychology.”
At the time, ecopsychology, as he put it, was a “woo-woo field,” with colleagues delving into shamanic rituals and Jungian deep ecology. dr. Doherty had a more conventional focus, on the physiological effects of anxiety. But he had picked up an idea that was new at the time: that people can be affected by environmental degradation even if they were not physically involved in a disaster.
Recent research leaves little doubt that this is happening. A study in ten countries of 10,000 people aged 16 to 25, published last month in The Lancet, found startling numbers of pessimism. Forty-five percent of respondents said climate concerns negatively impacted their daily lives. Three quarters said they believed “the future is frightening”, and 56 percent said “humanity is doomed to failure”.
The blow to young people’s confidence appears to be greater than previous threats, such as nuclear war, said Dr. Clayton. “We’ve certainly faced big problems before, but climate change is described as an existential threat,” she said. “It fundamentally undermines people’s sense of security.”
Caitlin Ecklund, 37, a Portland therapist who completed her graduate school in 2016, said nothing in her training — in topics such as buried trauma, family systems, cultural competence and attachment theory — had prepared her to help the young women who started looking at her. that describes hopelessness and sadness about the climate. She looks back on those first interactions as ‘misses’.