Book Review: Being a Therapist in a Time of Climate Breakdown, edited by Judith Anderson, Tree Staunton, Jenny O’Gorman and Caroline Hickman

Moving from the ‘human-human relationship’ approach in psychotherapy to the ‘human-living world’ paradigm, the anthology bridges the disciplines of therapy, eco-psychology and climate activism, a need arising from the “absence of relationship with the living world in our diagnostic thinking of developmental trauma, attachment patterns, personality adaptations and mental health problems” (62). The book is divided into five sections (twenty-two chapters), where the overarching theme is finding the imperative connection between mental health, its emotional impact and the climate breakdown as perceived and experienced by individuals in the form of ecological distress, eco-anxiety, solastalgia and climate grief. It further records the modes and methods by which therapists engage with clients and process their emotional responses to environmental destruction. The book challenges the Western notions of therapeutic profession while confronting individual trauma and collective planetary grief, urging therapists to move beyond resilience to the realms of responsibility, adaptation and ecological solidarity.