Search

This paper presents an argument that mainstream psychological practice is not equipped to respond to distress associated with the climate emergency. This is because the field focusses on individual pathology, rather than ecological context. It remains reticent about activism and politics and is ontologically aligned with the Anthropocene, a new era in which the human species is creating an observable effect in the geological record, to the detriment of the planet and its life forms. An introduction is provided to ecopsychology, a movement that has sought to subvert and transform mainstream psychology over the last three decades. Ecopsychology still offers an opportunity for mainstream psychology to alter its approach in the face of the climate emergency. What is already known about this topic: Clinical psychology is focussed on intrapsychic processes and indiivdual therapy. Psychology is typically hesitant about including political activism in clinical theorising or practice. New conceptualisations of both the psyche and practice are required in the Anthropocene. What this paper adds: Eco-psychology provides a framework for psychology in the climate crisis. The history of eco-psychology has ontological implications for traditional psychology. Interventions need to consider human distress as tied to the distress of non-human others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental disasters will increase in frequency and severity due to disruptions to Earth systems, including increased global mean temperatures, caused by human activity, and consequently our health care system will be burdened by ever-increasing rates of illness, mental and physical. Psychologists will need to respond to this pressure by ensuring they have the training, education and interventions to respond to climate-related distress, as well as realising the limits of the therapeutic approach. Climate psychology, a recent field of study integrating and advancing core expertise around climate distress, has become more prominent with the increasing urgency of climate change and emerging documentation of its impacts on mental health and wellbeing. The purpose of this scoping review is to survey the research being undertaken on climate distress, and to identify gaps in the existing literature with a view to shaping practice and informing future research. Younger people, notably, are experiencing climate distress disproportionately and will bear a larger share of the mental health burden caused by climate change, and yet their voices are underrepresented in theoretical and practical interventions. Enlisting young people as research collaborators and co-designers will facilitate more effective responses to the psychological aspects of the climate crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay charts a conceptual history of "planetary health," which holds that population health and the continuity of human civilization depend on the integrity—the health—of the Earth's life-support systems. It seeks to identify settler colonial and imperial genealogies of this distinctly ecological approach to human population health and flourishing, an assemblage of systems theory and planetary thinking as well as developments in environmental sciences and theories of sustainable development. Planetary health may be seen as a "third wave" of disease ecology, an emergent resource for more complex, naturalistic, and scaled-up modeling in epidemiology—the latest installment in the search for multifactorial, relational, and integrated explanations of patterns of disease. The approach required a new planetary imaginary—emerging from a series of Earth-encompassing crises, such as global heating—which enlarged and systematized ecological configurations of human health and illness. In tracing and critically situating this conceptual history, the authors offer a partial perspective on what may yet become planetary health, drawing attention to some other conceptual routes that may be taken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented which discusses several articles published within issue of the periodical on topics including writing and reading of records; nineteenth century British imperial military files; and digitization of historical knowledge and archives.

Following the injunction of the field of paperwork to look at paper, rather than through it for information, a close read of the first volumes of the New South Wales State Archives & Records series NRS 5031 discloses a surprising history. The New South Wales Legislative Council appointed a select committee in 1846 to enquire into the management of Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum - into its work. Finding the work in order, the committee quickly turned to its paperwork failures. The Legislative Council, created in 1843, worked tirelessly through the 1840s to establish control over the penal colony, anticipating self-government. Cited as an example of its humanitarian impulses and thorough committee work, the 1846 committee’s report shows parliamentarians embracing bureaucratic forms and medicine’s promise to cure madness. The absence of proper records was taken up by the committee and by the colonial press as a weapon; attacking the asylum officers, they attacked also the structure of colonial government and the likeness of irresponsible government in the colonies. NRS 5031, a series of casebooks filled out from 1847, helped to create the ‘imaginary’ lunatic asylum on paper which was demanded by these politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]