Tagged With "Ecological Grief"
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How a natural disaster led one town to do something about its ACEs, past and future
Tracy Franke, principal of Darrington Elementary School, a K-8 school with 300 students, had heard about CLEAR, and called Dr. Christopher Blodgett, who runs the program, to arrange a visit from Turner. “We were hurting,” says Franke. “Our students and staff needed some tools to get through the trauma.”
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How Scientists are Coping With 'Ecological Grief' [theguardian.com]
By Gaia Vince, The Guardian, January 12, 2020 Melting glaciers, coral reef death, wildlife disappearance, landscape alteration, climate change: our environment is transforming rapidly, and many of us are experiencing a sense of profound loss. Now, the scientists whose work it is to monitor and document this extraordinary change are beginning to articulate the emotional tsunami sweeping over the field, which they’re naming “ecological grief”. Researchers are starting to form support groups...
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How the Mental Health Community Is Bracing for the Impact of Climate Change “Eco-anxiety” and trauma from natural disasters will be on the rise along with sea levels
Rolling Stone, May 16, 2019 By Andrea Marks When San Francisco broke heat records in 2017, with 106-degree temperatures in September, psychiatrist Robin Cooper didn’t hear until after the fact that one of her patients had been feeling dizzy and feverish. One day, he’d fainted in his poorly ventilated workspace. Emergency room doctors had surmised he’d had a virus. But Cooper warned him it could actually be a drug she’d prescribed him interacting with the extreme heat. Certain antipsychotic...
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New York Life and Change in Mind Institute at the Alliance for Strong Families and Communites Partner on Grant Program to Support Communities Impacted by Disaster
WASHINGTON, D.C., June 1, 2018 – New York Life Insurance Company and the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities today announced the launch of a new grant program to support children, adults, families, and communities experiencing trauma resulting from natural disaster or community-wide tragedy. The partnership will serve as the first-ever disaster-focused grant for the New York Life Foundation, the charitable arm of the company. The program, Building Resilience in the Face of Disaster,...
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Preparing People for Climate Change in California: Sonoma County Listens and Shares
Last summer Bob Doppelt asked me to join a planning committee for a conference on climate change . I was surprised to be asked as my recent professional expertise is tied to addressing childhood adversity. Bob changed my perspective on the relevance by saying, "Adversity and trauma are the social side effects of climate-related disasters. Imagine the social-emotional impacts on Katrina survivors." The connection was a glimmer in my mind, but I agreed to support a California conference .
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Recommendations for preventing & healing pandemic generated mental health and psychosocial problems
Attached is a set of ITRC recommendations for swiftly organizing community-based initiatives to prevent and heal pandemic-generated mental health and psychosocial problems. If you find the recommendations helpful, please initiate the creation of a resilience coordinating council in your community or region. Please also pass the document on to other organizations and individuals that might find it useful. Thanks--and stay healthy during this stressful time, Bob Doppelt
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Texas Children’s Treating More Affected Children Two Years After Hurricane Harvey [hellowoodlands.com]
By Jenn Jacome, Hello Woodlands, August 12, 2019 Nearly two years after the historic rainfall and flooding of Hurricane Harvey, Texas Children’s Harvey Resiliency and Recovery Program is assessing and treating more children than it did in the six to eight months immediately following the storm. “Currently, we’re seeing about 250 kids per month in our Trauma and Grief Center overall when you look at new assessments and those coming in for return appointments, and many of these children were...
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The Best Medicine for My Climate Grief [yesmagazine.org]
Sometimes a wave of climate grief breaks over me. It happens unexpectedly, perhaps during a book talk, or while on the phone with a congressional representative. In a millisecond, without warning, I’ll feel my throat clench, my eyes sting, and my stomach drop as though the Earth below me is falling away. During these moments, I feel with excruciating clarity everything that we’re losing—but also connection and love for those things. Usually I don’t mind the grief. It’s clarifying. It makes...
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Tomorrow's Doctors Will Diagnose the Mental Toll of Climate Change
The Daily Dose, July 22, 2019 by Carly Stern https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/tomorrows-doctors-will-diagnose-the-mental-toll-of-climate-change/95540 First-year medical student Anna Goshua was interviewing an emergency room physician in March to learn more about the job when she heard about a patient who had come all the way from Puerto Rico to that ER in Massachusetts for health care. Hurricane Maria had wiped out all prospects of the patient seeking care at home. A surprised Goshua pored...
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Webinar Slides and Recording: Transformational Resilience for Climate Change Traumas and Toxic Stresses with Bob Doppelt
Recorded live October 28, 2019. Find the slides attached below. The webinar recording: You will learn: how climate change creates personal, family, and community traumas and toxic stresses; how those traumatic stressors trigger feedbacks that expand and aggravate ACEs and many other person, social, community, and societal maladies; why current approaches are woefully inadequate to address what is already occurring and rapidly steaming toward us and why prevention is the only realistic...
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Webinar Slides and Recording: Transformational Resilience for Climate Change Traumas and Toxic Stresses with Bob Doppelt
Recorded live October 28, 2019. Find the slides attached below. The webinar recording: You will learn: how climate change creates personal, family, and community traumas and toxic stresses; how those traumatic stressors trigger feedbacks that expand and aggravate ACEs and many other person, social, community, and societal maladies; why current approaches are woefully inadequate to address what is already occurring and rapidly steaming toward us and why prevention is the only realistic...
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Climate Change and Its Impacts on Mental Health
Psychiatric Times Oct 12, 2018, By David Pollack (ITRC National and PNW Steering Committee Member) Editor’s Note: One of the most important issues of our time regarding human health and mental health is the impact of climate change. This situation is, of course, not about a new impending ice age but is clearly about global warming. This matter has been discussed mainly in the political arena, and there, mainly as a political football/hot potato (no pun intended). Unfortunately, there has...
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Climate change and mental health: risks, impacts and priority actions
This is one of the better assessments of the psychological and psychosocial impacts of climate change, though it neglects some key issues. International Journal of Mental Health Systems, October 2018, by Katie Hayes et al. Abstract Background: This article provides an overview of the current and projected climate change risks and impacts to mental health and provides recommendations for priority actions to address the mental health consequences of climate change. Discussion and conclusion:...
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Climate Change Isn’t Just Frying the Planet—It’s Fraying Our Nerves “We kind of lose our cool.”
Rowan Walrath, Feb 18, 2019 Mother Jones Over the last year, Rebecca, a 35-year-old woman living in Washington, DC, had been losing sleep over the seemingly endless flow of apocalyptic environmental news. She fretted about the Trump administration’s loosening of emissions regulations and the United Nations’ dire predictions about climate change. In October, she sought help from a psychiatrist who put her on an antidepressant. “It sort of saps your emotional reserves,” she says, “this...
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CLIMATE CHANGE'S LOOMING MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS
Science Matt Simon 8.02.18 FOR THE INUIT of Labrador in Canada, climate disaster has already arrived. These indigenous people form an intense bond with their land, hunting for food and fur. “People like to go out on the land to feel good,” says Noah Nochasak in the documentary Lament for the Land . “If they can’t go out on the land, travel a long ways to feel good, they don’t feel like people.” The Inuit’s lands, though, are warming twice as fast as the global average, imperiling the ice...
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‘Climate Grief’: Fears About The Planet’s Future Weigh On Americans’ Mental Health [khn.org]
By Victoria Knight, Kaiser Health News, July 18, 2019. Therapist Andrew Bryant says the landmark United Nations climate report last October brought a new mental health concern to his patients. “I remember being in sessions with folks the next day. They had never mentioned climate change before, and they were like, ‘I keep hearing about this report,’” Bryant said. “Some of them expressed anxious feelings, and we kept talking about it over our next sessions.” The study, conducted by the...
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‘Eco-anxiety’ is a crushing weight for many young Canadians. And they say schools aren’t doing enough
By Natasha Comeau Special to the Star Feb. 23, 2020 During Yellowknife’s first Fridays For Future climate change march last fall, Dr. Courtney Howard spoke about her experience with a condition called eco-anxiety to “the most Yellowknifers I’ve seen in one spot.” She asked the young crowd — an estimated 1,000 people — to raise their hands if they also find themselves worried about climate change, and she watched “all these little hands go up.” Every day, young people are immersed in...
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'Ecological grief': Greenland residents traumatised by climate emergency
Greenland Islanders are struggling to reconcile impact of global heating with traditional ways of life, survey finds The Guardian Dan McDougall in Ilulissat and Tasiilaq, Greenland Mon .12 Aug 2019 The climate crisis is causing unprecedented levels of stress and anxiety to people in Greenland who are struggling to reconcile the traumatic impact of global heating with their traditional way of life . The first ever national survey examining the human impact of the climate emergency, revealed...
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Grieving For and Loving Our Planet (mindful.org)
Wilderness expert and renowned mindfulness teacher Mark Coleman shares how he is learning to hold the intense beauty of nature—and devastation of climate change—in his mindfulness practice. Today, because of climate crisis and changing ecology, the sense of finding nature as source of nourishment is changing. We now live in an era where the impacts of global warming—unprecedented forest fires, species extinction, coral reef deaths—are impossible to ignore. Our very experience of nature is...
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Even when the smoke clears, schools find student trauma can linger (Lake County Record Bee)
By Carolyn Jones, September 29, 2020, Lake County Record Bee. Schools can serve as a hub for an entire community after a disaster, experts say For some students, the fire is only the beginning. The nightmares, the grief and an all-consuming dread can persist for months or even years. That’s what teachers and school employees have observed among students in California’s fire-ravaged areas, especially Sonoma and Butte counties, where deadly wildfires have struck repeatedly in recent years.
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The complexity of climate grief: “You’ve lost something, even though it’s still there” [mic.com]
By Melissa Pandika, Mic, September 30, 2020 “You can see — the sky,” my dad said with boyish wonder in his voice when my family and I moved to California from New York City nearly 25 years ago. He later developed a habit of reclining on the diving board that hovered above the kidney-shaped swimming pool behind our house outside San Francisco, marveling at the expanse overhead, uninterrupted by buildings and utterly blue. I’d shrug off his awe, preoccupied with what I considered more pressing...
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SUNNY THOMPSON
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Climate Change Is Making Natural Disasters Worse — Along With Our Mental Health (NPR)
Through fires and hurricanes, through lethal heat waves and flash floods, the world seems to be ending — or at least, that's what it feels like. All around us, we're seeing the effects of climate change. Wildfires are raging through the West. Much of southeast Louisiana was flattened by Hurricane Ida , and parts of New York and New Jersey are digging out from disastrous flooding. And if it seems like natural disasters are happening more and more often, that's because they are : Climate...
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Perspectives and Practices for an Eco-Wise Culture
The very best remedy for climate anxiety is knowing that this a collective experience, not an individual experience. This is a 12-month learning community to build understanding, resiliency and togetherness amidst the ecological crisis we and our planet are facing.
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Repair And Care In A Ruptured World: Psychology Tends to The Climate Crisis with Dr. Wendy Greenspun
Like Kintsugi, the Japanese pottery tradition that mends broken shards with golden lacquer, movements toward repair of these various ruptures can create stronger ‘containers’ for the pain of individuals and communities and help us move toward essential action.
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A Sound Healing Grief Ritual for the Climate Crisis with Eric Bowers
When we don’t have support and space to grieve significant losses, the grief stays stuck inside us and takes a toll on our mental and physical health.
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‘Climate-Aware’ Therapy to Navigate Climate and Ecological Crisis with Caroline Hickman
Caroline Hickman will discuss developing a climate & bio-diversity crisis lens through which therapy can respond to these emerging concerns as well as how dreams and the imaginal are increasingly revealing what is under the surface of people’s climate distress.
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Natural Disasters are Traumatic: Urge Congress to Support Three Bills to Help Communities Heal
On September 18th, Hurricane Fiona made landfall on Puerto Rico, bringing massive rainfall, killing more than 30 people, and leaving 1.18 million people without power. Ten days later, Hurricane Ian hit Florida, killing over 100 people and displacing thousands whose homes were destroyed. The Mosquito Fire, which began in California on September 8th, is still active. So far, it has burned 80 thousand acres of land, evacuating 11,000 people and burning and damaging nearly 100 buildings. In...
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The Gift of Grief: Ecological Grief in an Era of Loss and Damage with Dr. Ashlee Cunsolo
We need not carry our planetary pain and sorrow in isolation; instead, we can mobilize our grief for collective-building, for activism, and for personal and planetary healing.
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On Oysters, Humans, and Climate Change with Priya Shukla
Learn about what it means to do science to help climate-proof an industry that provides infrastructure to a community and may also play a pivotal role in bringing back the oysters that preceded them.