Research and resources, shaped by those doing the work

Web resource from the Royal College of Psychiatrists aimed at young people, helping them understand climate-related distress and offering tools to feel better and take action.

Responding to George Monbiot's suggestion that we consider the psychological motivations of fracking enthusiasts, Randall argues the language of the fracking debate is determinedly and demeaningly masculine - a macho fixation shared with other large engineering projects (nuclear power, space exploration) that chimes with corporate desire to invest large sums, and links this to government rhetoric framing fracking in terms of energy security.

Drawing on Gregory Bateson's concept of epistemology and Jerome Bernstein's work on collective trauma, Robertson explores how what he calls 'hungry ghosts' - unmet needs and unprocessed collective or trans-generational trauma - surface in the therapy room, often mistaken by clients for purely personal history. He describes a clinical vignette in which attending to his own felt sense of grief and 'soul-making', rather than directing the client verbally, allowed a shift to occur. Robertson argues that Western individualism makes it easy to locate collective phenomena within one's own life story, exacerbating personal pain, and that psychotherapy faces a choice: continue domesticating clients' distress within existing cultural norms, or undergo its own 'deconstruction' to open space for renewal. Note: this excerpt draws on retrieved passages rather than confirmed opening paragraphs; worth checking against the full text.

This chapter focuses on the psychological work involved in addressing collective symptoms such as eco-anxiety, disorientation, terror, despair, helplessness and rage as humanity crosses a geological and cultural threshold into the Anthropocene. Drawing particularly on the Climate Psychology Alliance's 'Through the Door' workshop, running since 2018, the chapter outlines how psychotherapists and other professionals struggling with incapacity and helplessness have been supported, and shares therapeutic practices especially fit for this uncertain time.

In this review essay, Robertson engages with Nick Totton's Wild Therapy, exploring the historical, anthropological, political and psychological background to contemporary culture's loss of wildness, both internal and external. Rather than attempting an overarching unified theory for ecopsychology, Robertson notes, Totton instead weaves the notion of 'wildness' into a subtle and complex web that challenges core cultural assumptions - and argues that psychotherapy taking up these challenges seriously would return the profession to its more radical roots. Robertson considers what this reframing of wildness demands of psychotherapeutic practice and of practitioners themselves, situating Totton's framework within the wider development of ecopsychology as a field.

'Journey to the Lush Isle' is the first 'Small Forms' pamphlet created by Unpsychology contributors Lain Burgos-Lovece, Tali Sarnetzky and Chris Robertson (former CPA Chair, 2018-2020), with a fourth collaborator, Jo Regan, whose influence lingered in the words despite leaving the group early in the conversation. The pamphlet is a mix of conversation, commentary, imagination and story, at times reading like a tale from the future and at others like a warning in the here-and-now; throughout, it holds grief and grounded hope and beauty together.

Sickness, disillusion, loss and existential dreadIn the preparation for writing, I became sick. Perhaps like Bob Dylan sings, I was 'sick of love' but also subject to the toxicity in the darkness of the subject matter. My ambivalence to engaging is as much an aspect of the journey as the cognitive exploration. It is a transference to the material. It is dangerous and I have suffered in previous engagements. And it is the nature of such enquiries that they involve attempting to digest what has previously seemed poisonous.

Continuing directly from part 1, Robertson extends Winnicott's concept of the 'false self' - a defensive retreat from reality and external pressure - to what he terms a collective 'False World': a cultural fantasy of separation from ecological limits, exemplified by notions of escaping to other planets rather than reckoning with life on this one. He argues that relinquishing this false world is difficult precisely because so much has been invested in maintaining it. Drawing on the bidirectional coupling between earth systems and human social systems, Robertson explores how climate science's early focus on human impacts on the planet has increasingly given way to recognising feedback effects on humans themselves - forced migration, disease, infertility, conflict - and situates eco-anxiety within this entanglement as a complex mix of care, grief and complicity that can act as a catalyst for change rather than only a source of paralysis. The essay closes by considering what psychological and cultural practices might support staying at this 'cusp' rather than retreating from it, drawing on Hillman, Baldwin, and contemporary climate psychology research on young people's climate anxiety and moral injury.