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Last fall, Ms. Black, in the video, is sitting in front of a large, bright photo of evergreens with Dr. He signed in for his first meeting with Doherty.

The 56-year-old is one of the most visible authorities on climate in psychotherapy and hosts a podcast, “Climate Change and HappinessIn her clinical practice, she reaches beyond standard anxiety treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy to more obscure treatments such as existential therapy, designed to help people combat hopelessness, and ecotherapy, which explores the client’s relationship to the natural world.

He did not take the usual route to psychology; After graduating from Columbia University, he hitchhiked across the country to work on fishing boats in Alaska, then as a rafting guide – “the whole Jack London thing” – and a Greenpeace fundraiser. As he enters graduate school in his 30s, naturally the discipline of “ecopsychology””

At the time, ecopsychology was, as he put it, a “woo-woo field” where his colleagues explored shamanic rituals and Jungian deep ecology. Dr. Doherty focused on the physiological effects of anxiety in a more traditional way. But he had a new idea at the time: that people could still be affected by environmental degradation, even if they weren’t physically caught in a disaster.

Recent research has left little doubt that this is happening. A 10-country survey of 10,000 people aged 16 to 25 published in The Lancet last month found pessimism of startling proportions. Forty-five percent of those surveyed said that concerns about the climate had a negative impact on their daily lives. Three-quarters said they believed “the future is scary”, while 56 percent said “humanity is doomed”.

Dr. Clayton said the blow to young people’s self-esteem was deeper than previous threats such as nuclear war. “We’ve certainly faced major challenges before, but climate change is being identified as an existential threat,” he said. “It simply undermines people’s sense of security.”

Caitlin Ecklund, 37, a Portland therapist who completed her graduate studies in 2016, said that nothing in her training on topics such as embedded trauma, family systems, cultural competence and attachment theory prepared her to help young women who are starting to come to her. describes the despair and grief over the climate. He looks at first interactions as “miss”.