She is among the growing numbers of mental health counselors in the North Bay and across the country who are specializing in what’s called climate psychology, which looks at the psychological impacts of climate change. It’s different than mental health professionals who help people manage any anxiety or grief over the climate crisis, what’s known as ecopsychology. Climate psychologists help clients manage the trauma resulting from experiencing climate-driven natural disasters such as wildfires, hurricanes and tsunamis. As Silverstein and other climate psychologists in North Bay observe, the need is growing. According to a 2023 study of 382 licensed mental health care providers in the United States, 46% shared that they don’t think they are well-equipped to help their clients deal with the psychological distress created by climate change. “We don’t have enough people trained. The need is far outpacing the availability of providers,” says Silverstein. That shortage is coming at a time when climate-
A growing number of North Bay mental health counselors are focusing on the psychological impacts of climate change.
fueled disasters are already much worse than scientists had predicted, according to a 2023 report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Climate disasters are happening more quickly, they’re happening more intensely, they’re impacting more lives for longer periods of time and a lot of people will be evacuated from one fire and then the next season be evacuated from another and then lose their house. So, there’s an ongoing-ness to it,” says
Emily Swanson, a Woodacre-based eco- and climate psychologist. It’s still too common that those seeking help may end up seeing a therapist who may not be skilled enough in how experiencing a climate-fueled disaster impacts a person, which can be really damaging, says Leslie Davenport, one of the founders of Marin General’s Institute of Health and Healing and a climate psychology consultant with offices in Marin and Tacoma, Washington. “Clients
have told me that they feel sort of gaslit. They get diagnosed with general anxiety and … so they feel more isolated, more distressed, less validated than when they went into therapy.” People can develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or depression from numerous experiences, but the PTSD or depression brought on by a climate-fueled natural disaster “has a different feel,” says Swanson, the Northern California state coordinator for the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America (CPANA), a nonprofit that educates and trains mental health professionals in climate-aware practices in the U.S. and Canada and that has seen a huge jump in membership in recent years. “There can be a quality of impersonalness to it. There often isn’t a relational component to it. But the impacts to the psyche can be very, very similar,” Swanson says. “One of the things that can be really hard, like coming out of a disaster of the fires in L.A., people are in shock and they’re in shock a long time, but you need to call your insurance company at a moment that every single psychologist would be telling you not to make a big life decision. So, we’re in this place where our systems are not meeting the mental health need of our people when these things happen.”
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