A Conversation About… Climate Change and Mental Health – Part 3

Disclaimer: The following transcript has been autogenerated and may contain occasional errors or inaccuracies resulting from the automated transcription process.

Host (00:01):

Hi there. Welcome to Mental Health Professionals Network podcast series MHPN’s aim is to promote and celebrate interdisciplinary collaborative mental health care.

Merle Conyer (00:18):

Welcome to MHPN presents a conversation about climate change and mental health. This is a four-part podcast series that explores the relationship between the climate emergency we currently face and our mental health. My name is Merle Conyer and I’m delighted to be hosting the third episode of this series. I’m come to you from Garigal land, where I pay respects to the elders who’ve cared for this country for so many thousands of generations and pay respect to the elders of the countries on which you are all listening. Today. I also wish to extend my gratitude for the generosity of spirits in Aboriginal people extending to all of us their knowledge, wisdom, and guidance to support us together to face these times. My work is as an independent practitioner, I work at the intersection of trauma, healing, and justice with service providers, teams, organisations, and communities.

(01:17):

And one of my motivations is to provide support to people and communities as we find our way to life-affirming actions for all beings on our planet and how we together as mental health professionals provide assistance and safe spaces for all of us to do our work in facing the complexity of the times that we are in. I’m delighted today that we’ll be meeting together with my colleagues Ann Sanson and Susie Burke. I certainly first met Susie and Ann through their written work and webinars, which have greatly informed my own thinking, and it’s a real delight to be in this conversation series with both of you. So welcome, Ann. So good to see you again.

Professor Ann Sanson (02:04):

Very nice to see you too, Merle, it’s lovely to be here.

Merle Conyer (02:08):

Would you please share with our listeners a bit about yourself and what it is that brings you to be engaging in today’s conversation?

Professor Ann Sanson (02:13):

Sure. So I’m a developmental psychologist by training also a mother and a grandmother. And I guess from all of those perspectives, I’m just really worried about how this generation of young people and the next generation are going to cope with the changes that are coming along with the climate emergency and how they’re going to cope in the future with the massive changes that are ahead and what we can do as mental health providers to support them. I guess I came to that realisation after my career in developmental psychology where I was really looking at how we can best support children to grow up, to be happy and healthy and productive adults, and then realise that really the basic ingredient of having a safe place to live was actually being threatened by climate change. So that’s for the last decade, that’s become my focus and that’s what brings me here today.

Merle Conyer (03:16):

Well, thank you Ann. And I really feel a sense of gratitude to both you and Susie for the leadership that you’ve had in this space, which supports us to step into your big shoes as we move forward in trying to make contributions in our own ways. Susie, welcome back to you. How are you today?

Dr Susie Burke (03:36):

Thank you very much, Merle. Very happy to be here.

Merle Conyer (03:38):

And would you like to share a little bit with our listeners around what brings you here?

Dr Susie Burke (03:42):

Yes, sure. Well, I’ve actually known Ann Sanson since I was a little undergraduate years and years ago, last century, and she was my social psychology teacher at Melbourne University. So that’s a long history, isn’t it? But we’ve more recently been working over the last two decades, I suppose, when I was working at the Australian Psychological Society on the topic of climate change. And when I was also working at the APS, I was raising three children and I started a forest kindergarten in the community that I live in Dja Dja Wurrung Country, which is where I’m still living in Central Victoria. And at the same time, Ann and I were looking into the impacts of climate change on children and understanding what it is about how to develop environmental values in children. And so there was this interesting dual role that I was having both raising my children and trying to bring them up to be responsible citizens, but also looking at the research about climate impacts. And my children are all adults now, although I had a stepson who’s still at school, but several years ago, my daughter was one of the three kids in Castlemaine, that started the school strikes in Australia following Greta Thunberg’s excellent lead. And so that was a flurry of activity and drama and excitement in our communities and the whole of the world, wasn’t it, in the years pre-Covid. And so that’s also been an interesting intersection, my and my family’s climate activism alongside the work that I do in psychology. And I’m also working as a private practitioner seeing clients and working with groups and organisations as well around these themes as well.

Merle Conyer (05:17):

Thank you, Susie. It really strikes me as I listen to both you and Ann, how when we do enter into the space and make commitments, the personal and the professional become so intertwined, and the one is support to the other and the other is strengthened as a result. So thanks to both of you for sharing a little about your commitments and what brings you here across the series that the three of us are exploring at the moment that the nexus between climate change and mental health. Some of the things we’re discussing is, well, what is this nexus? Who does climate emergency impact and how, what does this mean for clinical? And how can we mental health providers look after our clients as well as ourselves in this global emergency? In our first episode, we discussed why from our point of view, we should understand the climate crisis as a global emergency from which no one is safe, what are the mental health impacts of this emergency and which population cohorts are particularly at risk?

(06:24):

In the next episode, our second episode, we discussed how our models of individual and clinical group practise can and indeed we suggest should pivot to respond to this time of the climate emergency. In today’s episode, we’re going to discuss the subject very close to all of our hearts, and that is supporting children and young people in the climate emergency. We’ll be sharing with our listeners what the research tells us about the reactions of children and young people to the climate emergency and how parents and mental health providers can best respond to their needs. So I wonder, Ann, if you might like to start off by sharing your thoughts on why do you feel it’s necessary for us to bring a focus to children and young people and therefore to their parents as well?

Professor Ann Sanson (07:16):

Yeah, sure, Merle thanks very much. I guess the starting point is that children and young people are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change than adults, and that’s partly physiological because they’re young and small, and so they’re more susceptible to deaths and injuries when they get caught up in climate disasters like floods and hurricanes and bush fires. They’re also more susceptible to the infectious diseases that are getting more common with climate change like malaria and dengue fever, increasing their range. And kids are more susceptible to those, also more susceptible to extreme heat. And I guess another reason why they’re vulnerable is that, especially with younger kids, is that they’re dependent on adults. So if adults aren’t available because they’ve been injured or even died in a climate emergency climate disaster, or if they’ve been separated from them, or even

(08:16):

if they’re just highly stressed because they’re dealing with the chaos that results from a disaster, it’s very hard then for kids to get the care that they need. They’re also susceptible probably more than adults for feeling pretty hopeless and helpless in the face of a disaster. What can I do? And being out of control. Another reason, of course, is it’s today’s young generation that are going to inherit the mess that previous generations have created in terms of climate change. And so they’re going to be experiencing the worst of its impacts. So I think I mentioned in the first episode the modelling by Thiery and his colleagues, which showed that a kid born in 2020 is likely to experience 24 times more climate disasters than somebody born in 1960. So that way if you add that up, if you think about somebody born in 1960 might have experienced one or two in their lifetime, the numbers that this generation of young people are going to face is just amazing.

(09:22):

It’s one every couple of years. So that’s really hard to contemplate how they’re going to be coping with that. And so we really need to be getting our thinking right about how we’re going to support them. And then there are likely to be, besides the increase in climate related disasters of floods and droughts and so on, there’s also likely to be food and water shortages. There’s likely to be mass migrations of climate refugees and societies are going to have to learn how to welcome them and incorporate them into their worlds. The loss of loved spaces is already something that I think people are experiencing is likely to increase. So it really seems to me like an issue of intergenerational injustice that previous

(10:08):

generations are handing on some really big challenges to the next generation. And of course, in addressing the climate crisis, they’re also going to have to make large, huge changes in lifestyle. We all are, but particularly the younger generations in what we eat, what we buy, how we travel, how much we travel, all sorts of changes in lifestyle, which is also going to create challenges. So lots of reasons why we ought to be thinking as mental health providers about how we can support kids.

Dr Susie Burke (10:39):

And Ann the other thing I remember talking about with you, I think we popped it in some of the papers that we’ve written, was also the way we’re really interested in how children are feeling and responding and thinking about climate change because they are consumers both now and into the future, but they’re also going to be the future leaders and the future decision makers. And so the values with which they are growing up are also incredibly important in terms of how easy or not easy it’ll be for them to be the next leaders for supporting transition to zero carbon and just transition.

Professor Ann Sanson (11:13):

Yes, absolutely. Yeah. So we really need to be thinking about what sorts of values we are needing to instill in them to help them develop.

Merle Conyer (11:22):

Susie I wonder if you might share what some of the research says about the reactions of young people. I recall in one of our earlier episodes you indicating that young people can have greater impacts sometimes in terms of the emotional responses than adults. So I wonder if you might share some of what the research is letting us know.

Dr Susie Burke (11:42):

Yes, sure. So I mean, first of all, there isn’t a huge amount of research looking at children and young people’s thoughts and feelings about climate change. And so we tend to know quite well the papers and research that has been done. So one of the papers that has been published on a large cohort of children was published by Hickman et al. It was a group of researchers that were studying 10,000 children aged between 16-25 across 10 countries, both in the global south and in the global north. And there were Australian cohort in this study as well. And what they found was that as is always the case in these studies, young people are reporting increasingly higher levels of climate worry and climate distress. And the numbers that they decided were 60% of their respondents reported being extremely or very worried about climate change. So those are strong sentiments and strong words and 58%, so almost the same amount reported feeling betrayed by the government’s actions.

(12:45):

So this is, remember across 10 different countries, and that was a very strong finding as well. So they’ve not just experiencing distress around climate, but they’re also experiencing distress around what politicians and governments and leaders are doing. And I think that’s a really important finding for us to be remembering. Other studies will report that they’re feeling hopelessness or pessimism regarding climate change, even though young people are turning out in a lot of the climate action. But then of course, a lot of children also aren’t involved in any sort of climate action as well. It’s some interesting research just published this year by Maria Ojala, who’s a Swedish environmental psychologist who’s done decades of work looking at how children and young people are thinking and feeling about climate change. She’s now started to divide the children or young people’s climate worries into micro worries and macro worries. So micro worries are the worries that climate change will have negative consequences for yourself and your family and your friends. So your immediate world and the macro worries are the worries about the impacts that climate change is going to have on other generations, future generations and plants and animals. The research is starting to get a little bit more finally nuanced. It’s interesting information that’s been collated and collected, but a huge amount more research is needed.

Merle Conyer (14:08):

One of the things that really strikes me, Susie, when you’re talking about the betrayal of governments from Caroline Hickman’s study, and similarly Ann, when you were outlining the wide ranging impacts to children and young people, and I think it’s an important point for us as mental health providers to hold in mind is that when we think about the climate crisis, we need to go beyond thinking of it as extreme weather events. It’s also about fundamental social injustice implications in terms of how it’ll touch people’s lives differently. But in terms of the betrayal of governments, that moral distress is arising because we actually know the steps that we need to start mitigating some of the effects. And the absence of doing that is an absence of care. And so I think it’s really important as mental health providers that we hold that wider lens when we are thinking about the ways that the climate crisis might impact and go beyond thinking of it as only extreme weather events. So I appreciate the way that both of you have really widened the lens for us to turn our minds to today. Ann, were there some other findings from Carolyn Hickman’s study that you would like to share?

Professor Ann Sanson (15:24):

Oh, I think Susie has summarised it pretty well when she says that 60% were feeling very or extremely worried about it, it’s also interesting that there were hardly any kids who said they were not at all worried about it. So the rest of them were either moderately or mildly worried. So basically the whole group of this 10,000 young people, except for a very small number, we’re worried to some level. Another really worrying finding in it was the same sort of percentage. 58% felt that humanity was doomed, that we are not going to get on top of this. And that’s really worrying for us as mental health providers to think about kids growing up with that sort of sense of hopelessness. I think. And we know from that and other research too, that a lot of young people are really wondering whether they ought to have children, whether it’s the right thing to do to bring another generation of children into the world considering the dangers that we’re facing.

Merle Conyer (16:19):

And if I recall correctly, I think it was just above 40% of young people in that study indicated that these reproductive decision-making that they’re considering in terms of whether they have children or not, which is a really high number specifically being related to the climate crisis and them thinking about their own potential children.

Professor Ann Sanson (16:41):

Absolutely.

Merle Conyer (16:43):

So what is fair for us to consider, and I go back to Ann, that word you brought in right at the very start of episode one, that this is really an unprecedented situation for parents and for others who have responsibility for young people. I’m including teachers and other caregivers. I know that some parents are telling me that having the climate conversation is even harder than having the sex conversation with the young people. And a question that often comes up in conversation with parents and with grandparents is how much to share with young people about climate change and how to have conversations without causing them undue anxiety. Parents are telling me that they worry conversations might distress young people, but what’s happening also not wanting to upset them means that some are avoiding having the conversation altogether. I wonder, Ann, what are your thoughts around this?

Professor Ann Sanson (17:42):

Yeah, well, I guess partly with Susie and partly with the other thinking and writing that we’ve done, I’ve sort of come to four main messages that I tend to give to parents when I’m doing talks or workshops with parents about these issues. And the first is that it is really important to listen to them. And you’re quite right, the parents are reluctant, sometimes reluctant to bring up the topic. Kids are also sometimes reluctant. Maybe they don’t know the words, maybe they know their parents are already worried, they don’t want to burden them further. Maybe they think it’s not cool to show that they care. That seems to be something that’s particularly common with boys. But I think this, we talked in episode two about the sort of conspiracy of silence around climate change. I think it is really important for kids to be able to share their feelings and for parents to find spaces where kids can talk maybe when there’s something on the news for parents to say, oh, what do you feel when you see these things about these floods?

(18:47):

And to really listen to what they have to say and to avoid that temptation just to say there there dear, everything will be all right. Don’t you worry your little head about it. But rather to validate those feelings and to say, yeah, it is a big problem I worry about too. I can understand why you’re worried. Yes, I can understand why you’re angry with my generation for having created this mess. It really is something we have to get on top of. I think it is really important to give kids that opportunity to express their feelings. And not all kids are going to be worried about climate change. Some are going to be worried about much more local and immediate things. The second is building their understanding. So you’re quite right that a lot of parents want to shield their children from thinking about or knowing about this great big, awful problem that is facing us.

(19:39):

But I don’t think it’s actually possible to shield kids from this these days. We were saying before, it’s in just about in every news bulletin. It’s around them all the time. It’s in the social media. And it’s much better for them to have those conversations with a trusted love and loving adult than it is to pick it up through social media or from the playground where you don’t know how it’s going to be framed. So I think it’s really important to find out how much they know and to build their understanding not just about the horrible things that climate change is going to bring, but probably more importantly why it’s happening and even more importantly, what the solutions are, what we can do about it. And the third is a really important one that you and Susie were talking a lot about in the last episode when you were talking about your really creative clinical practises with your clients and with community groups.

(20:35):

And that is building hope. And it’s this active hope or realistic hope, which isn’t saying everything will be all right, we don’t need to worry. But saying, yes, this is a huge and urgent problem, but we actually do know what the solutions are. We know what needs to be done. Lots of good people are working on it, not just the scientists and the engineers and people who are working on technical solutions, but also all the people who are working so hard to persuade our governments and our corporations and everyone else to do the right thing. And then I think Susie talked about this a bit in the last episode too, that it’s a really good time to talk about the big problems we have solved in the past, like slavery, like women’s suffrage, like the overthrow of the Marcos regime in the Philippines, all sorts of examples that some of our environmental things, successes, and how in all of those cases, it’s because tens and hundreds and thousands and millions of people got together and demanded that the governments take action.

(21:38):

So that’s building that sense of efficacy. There’s something we can do about this, we can actually get together on this, and the people power people working together can actually make a difference. And then the last thing I say to parents is to build their capacity to take action. So my little mantra, which I’ll be interested in your views about, but my little mantra is that action is the best antidote to anxiety. I think it’s basically true for any forms of anxiety, but perhaps particularly so for anxiety and worry and all those other emotions that come about with climate change. So I guess I really encourage parents to be good role models of taking action in their own personal lives and as citizens. And I encourage them to help their kids think about the things that they could be doing and encouraging them to, if they are really concerned, then to try to hook up with other kids who are also concerned because this is hard stuff to handle on your own. And if they are wanting to take action, then to support them in that activism, I’m sure we’ll talk about that a bit more as we go along in this conversation. But those to me are the sorts of messages that I think are important for parents. Along with of course, many also need support and help in dealing with their own climate anxieties. And that’s another whole question

Dr Susie Burke (23:01):

As I was listening to you talking, Ann, I was thinking that you’ve just beautifully illustrated all of those three coping strategies in that transactional stress and coping model. The emotion focused coping, which is the listening to the children and validating them and soothing warm tone and being interested and open to them. And then there’s the focus scoping, which is that last one you talked about with the action, both modelling your own climate action to reassure them that actually people do care and do something about it, and you can do something about it as well as helping them to find their own things that they can do if that’s something that they’re interested in. And then the third one, which was actually your second one, which was the meaning, focus, coping strategies, all those things about activating the, and Ojala’s research is really clear that meaning focus coping is positively associated with all aspects of subjective wellbeing for young people and for adults as well.

(23:54):

So that’s such a terrific one and an additional one that fits into that, meaning focus coping is also the helping young people and children to focus on and think about all the positives that would come from a zero carbon economy or a transformed world that we live in, all the healthy air that we would be breathing and the interconnected communities and more active transport and eating lower on the food chain, all those sorts of things that are actually good for our health, good for our communities and our relationships as well as good for the planet. So that’s sort of another way in which we can help them to feel a sense of optimism and hope in the things that we’re doing. But I’ve got a few things to add to Ann’s list as well, so can I keep jumping in?

Merle Conyer (24:42):

Yes, please.

Dr Susie Burke (24:44):

Because some of the other things I do these parenting workshops, and it’s probably doing more than me, but to enter that would be parents giving children opportunities to fall in love with nature and to hear the music of nature to help them develop those pro-environmental values. And some of the research that’s been done in this area looks at how children have to first learn how to be in nature, i e, they actually have to be able to walk on uneven ground and cross riverbeds and climb over logs and things like that before they can then be with nature, which is the next step where they’re interacting, building little houses and floating things down rivers and things like that. And that stage comes before they can then act for nature, which is when they start to take a care and responsibility for nature and clean things up and when they’re older, participate in rallies and sort of all of those things as well. So that would be one that I would add. And the other one would be that we often talk about is parents also talking with children about they, the parents have developed their own inner strength muscle. So how do I cope when I’m feeling flat or down in the dumps about something or really worried about something? These are the things that I do. I might go and listen to some music or I might go for a walk, or I might ring a friend, or I might have a bit of a cuddle with the dog or things like that. And modelling, but through your words as well, stories of how you cope with things.

Professor Ann Sanson (26:09):

Yeah, I think all of those are really important, that the sort of being in nature, feeling comfortable being in nature, then leading to that sense of being part of and interconnected with nature and then motivated to act for nature, I think is a really important ingredient. And I think you’re right about the different forms of modelling that parents can take. I think one thing that probably many of us don’t do as much as we might do is we might do all these pro-environmental things in our life, but we don’t necessarily spell out why we’re doing it.

(26:43):

So to actually say to kids, I’m not wrapping your lunch in plastic anymore because blah, blah, blah are about carbon emissions, or I’m taking the train to work instead of driving my car because, and spelling out that the implications. And setting high standards for kids’ own pro-environmental behaviour at home I think is really important as well. In this house, we turn off the lights when we leave it, in this house we don’t eat much meat, whatever it might be.

Dr Susie Burke (27:09):

We used to say to our children if they wanted to lift somewhere, we are not burning fossil fuels to drive you to soccer. You can get on your bike and get there yourself for things like that. And I also, for a while there, when I had teenagers instituted family holidays, going to climate protests because that seemed like a good adventure that we could all get behind and have fun and learn active citizenship skills doing so. There are many ways in which parents can be very obvious about the sort of values that this family has with an open invitation to the children to take them on themselves.

Merle Conyer (27:45):

So you’ve shared with us and with the listeners a whole range of ways that parents can support the children and young people in their lives. I wonder if we might just turn our thoughts now to how the mental health professionals support parents and children.

Dr Susie Burke (28:00):

Well, one of the things that I was thinking, if I might just jump in when Ann was talking before, was that we have a responsibility as mental health practitioners to be helping our parents that we work with to develop psychological infrastructure. So it might not be time, there might not be time left to develop the physical infrastructure that we need to urgently transition to a zero carbon world, but we certainly have time to develop the psychological infrastructure. And so once we’ve learned those skills of coping, that problem, focus, emotion, focus and meaning, focus coping, once we’ve learned about how to act in line with your values, not getting jerked around by your feelings and acting in ways that just dissuade your feelings of discomfort, then we’re developing a resilience. And it also means that we are then able, when our children ask us about climate change or when we are thinking, should I talk about to my children about climate change? We can say, yes, yes, I know how to do that. Because I have developed my own psychological infrastructure for being able to cope with the difficulties of getting my head around and understanding and making sense of climate change, and I can now have those conversations and support my children and understanding that.

Merle Conyer (29:11):

Really interesting to hear this idea of psychological infrastructure, Susie,

Dr Susie Burke (29:15):

That came from Devon Guthrie.

Merle Conyer (29:17):

Great, thank you. Ann, have you got an example you might want to share around how mental health practitioners can support parents and young people?

Professor Ann Sanson (29:26):

I guess that what I’d like to share is some of the stories about the sort of participatory action research that people are undertaking, partly with a view of helping kids psychologically to be coping with climate change through taking action. And there are stacks of those around that’s still reaching a minority of children. That needs to be much more of it. But I think they’re really nice project. So for example, at my University of Melbourne, a group have developed a website called the Climate Superpowers, which they co-designed with young people, and it’s helping kids think about what their strengths are for dealing with climate change. And that’s, I think, a very nice thing. There are lots of other examples, particularly in disaster pride areas where people, psychologists who got together with young people to look at what their disaster risk is, and then to take action to remove those risks, like moving their school from a landslide risk area or just to observe their natural environment and to notice what’s going on and then take action on the things that are going on. I think those sort of participatory projects are really good for kids, for young people.

Merle Conyer (30:42):

That really strikes me as well, that invitation is to walk alongside young people looking at what we’re facing rather than shielding them from it. And the importance of planning as well as responding to what’s occurring, nourishing a sense of agency. So if we take that theme of agency, which is such an important theme because what we know from trauma theory is one of the things at the heart of the ongoing experiences of trauma is a loss of agency to act on our own behalf or on behalf of our loved ones and our communities to have enough sense of safety. And I’m hearing from both of you a nourishment around agency. So I’m curious about your thoughts around young people engaging in activism. We hear different views. We’ve seen the school strikes have been a massive global voicing by young people, and yet we sometimes hear some in the community saying children should be at school and not getting involved in those kinds of things. I’d be really interested in your thoughts. So I wonder, Ann, might you want to begin and then let’s hear from you as well, Susie?

Professor Ann Sanson (31:55):

Sure. Okay. Well, maybe what I’ll do is describe a little bit of research that I did with a young climate activist called Marco Bellamo. He’s now a young man, but he was then a youth. And we were interested in this question of how taking action might impact on kids, why they did it and how it was to take action. So we interviewed a whole lot of his fellow climate activists around the world, and we published, we’ll put a link to out that little paper from the British Journal of Psychiatry up on one of the links here. But I was really struck with what the kids said. What I’d like to do is just read out a quote from one of the kids, if that’s all right. So Young Alice, I think she was then about 17, and she said, taking action creates a sense of solidarity, of cooperation and productivity in the face of despair.

(32:50):

So she talked about how before this, she had been really despairing and feeling very hopeless. And she says, I’ve learned how to talk to authority figures, recognise my rights, speak confidently in public, communicate nonviolently and how to work effectively in a collective. And these sort of statements that kids were giving us made me really recognise how taking action on this huge source of anxiety is actually building a lot of the skills that we think the kids are going to need for coping with a climate affected world. They’re learning self-regulation, managing their behaviour and their feelings. They’re learning self-efficacy, that there are things that they can do that promote building these bigger than self values of social justice and care and compassion. They’re learning about cooperation and conflict resolution that’s going to be so important

(33:47):

for the world that they’re going to be moving into, and importantly, these active citizenship skills. So I think that’s one of the really critical things that all of us need to be building in ourselves really, is how we can effectively and nonviolently influence decision makers to take the action that we know is needed. I think through the school strikes and other things like this, kids are getting an opportunity to learn those skills. So for me, when parents ask me, is it right for me to encourage my kid to take action? I say, I think it’s developmentally sound and psychologically sound to do so if this fits with their personality and their wishes and how they’re feeling. Susie, I’m sure you’ve got things to add to that.

Dr Susie Burke (34:32):

Well, that’s pretty obvious what I think, isn’t it? Given that I confessed that I take my children on family holidays to protest climate protest camps. But I mean, I would perhaps just labour the point that I think was really evident in that of the quote you read out from Alice, plus also what you were saying, Ann, which is the activism that the children are usually engaging in, puts them in contact with a whole lot of other people who share their concerns, young people and adults. And that social support is just the golden ingredient, I think, because it helps them realise, I’m not in this alone. We’re all in this together. We all care about this. The world is a good place. There are good people in the world, and I’m really pleased to be a part of it, and this is my part in it.

Merle Conyer (35:20):

Thank you, Susie, and thank you, Ann. And as we are coming towards the end of this episode, my mind is going back to the start and where you outlined the kinds of impacts that young people can potentially anticipate. And so I’m really thinking here of our listeners that this information is not easy to hear. This information is deeply personal. It affects our children, our grandchildren, our nieces, our nephews, our little ones in our community, the grandchildren that perhaps listeners hope to have. And so I want to really just extend our thoughts of care, how important it’s to look after ourselves as we encounter this information. And even there may be some listeners for whom this is really familiar revisiting, it still can bring great impacts as the knowledge and the concerns become more deeply understood. So we will, in our next episode, start off by thinking about what does this mean for us? How do we care for ourselves so that we can be the parents, the caregivers, the mental health practitioners that can be of support and can be of service to young people, and indeed all of those in our communities. So I’d like to thank all the listeners for joining Ann and Susie and myself on this episode of MHPN Presents, a conversation about climate change and mental health. You’ve been listening to me, Merle Conyer,

Professor Ann Sanson (36:53):

And me Ann Sanson.

Dr Susie Burke (36:54):

And me Susie Burke.

Merle Conyer (36:57):

We really hope that you’ve got value from this conversation as much as we have. In our first episode, we set the scene by identifying what climate change has got to do with clinical practice and followed this in the second episode by exploring how our models of clinical practice can and should pivot to respond to this climate emergency. In today’s episode, we discussed how children and young people are understandably reacting to the climate crisis and how we as parents, mental health providers, and others in the community can best stand by and support them in protecting their future. In the next and our last episode in this series, which will be released in a fortnight, we’ll discuss what all of this means for us, the mental health providers. How can we look after ourselves? What do we need from our professional associations? What are the opportunities that are there for us to take up?

(37:56):

If you would like to learn more about Ann, Susie or myself, or if you want to access the resources, we’ve referred to, please go to the landing page of this episode and follow the hyperlinks, MHPN values your feedback on the landing page. You’ll also find a link to a feedback survey. Please follow the link and let us know your thoughts about this episode, providing any comments and suggestions about how we and MHPN can better meet your needs. Thank you so much for your commitment to and engagement with interdisciplinary person-centered mental health care. It’s goodbye

Professor Ann Sanson (38:32):

From me,

Dr Susie Burke (38:33):

and me

Merle Conyer (38:34):

And me. Please do join us for the next podcast conversation in the series. It’ll be released Wednesday, two weeks time.

Host (38:44):

Visit mhpn.org au to find out more about our online professional program, including podcasts, webinars, as well as our face-to-face interdisciplinary mental health networks across Australia.