How do we think about climate change in the consulting room?

In 2022 the publishers approached Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) with an idea for a book 'about climate change and psychotherapy'. Over the next 2 years a team of four practitioners took up this idea and with the help of colleagues produced a volume Being a Therapist in a Time of Climate Breakdown to showcase many of the ideas and practices of the organisation. Uniquely we added the voices of many young people.

Published in 2024 this book is more relevant than ever in the summer of 2026. More therapists are becoming aware of the reality of climate change as they live through heatwaves throughout Europe, with wider destabilisation of climate manifest globally. Practitioners are waking up to the idea that this may be relevant for practice.

Being a Therapist in a Time of Climate Breakdown introduces readers to the known psychological aspects of climate change as a pressing global concern and explores how they are 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. It includes Voices from people who are not practitioners about their experience including how they see the role of therapy. 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.

The editor and chapter authors hope that the book 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.

The e-version of the book is Open Access, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com and has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Wings of Hope