At RCPI’s next Masterclass, a clinical psychologist talks about treating ecoanxiety
Dr Marc Williams will talk about ecoanxiety and its implications for healthcare workers at RCPI’s online Masterclass on Healthcare Sustainability on 11 February.
A clinical psychologist with the NHS’s Cardiff and Wales University Health Board, Dr Williams runs a clinic where he has treated patients with ecoanxiety. He is also co-chair of the recently formed Planetary Health subgroup within the Division of Clinical Psychologists.
“Ecoanxiety is a chronic fear of environmental catastrophe, one that’s focused on climate and ecological change. It’s more than just a concern at the back of their mind. For people with ecoanxiety, it’s a prevailing preoccupation that may impact on their daily function. It might make it harder for them to socialise as they normally would, to work as they normally would, or enjoy life. It impairs, at a certain level, their ability to live life in the way they’d like,” he says.
Dr Williams also lectures at Cardiff University, where he trains the next generation of clinical psychologists. He increasingly sees a need for awareness of ecoanxiety to be incorporated into training. “In children and adolescent mental health services, I’m hearing accounts of children raising ecoanxiety as a concern, and of staff not knowing how to respond to it as a concern. There’s a knowledge gap there, not knowing what to do with this experience. Do we tell people not to worry about climate change? Do we tell people to get up and do something about it? People just don’t know what to do,” he says.
His presentation at RCPI’s Masterclass is titled “Ecoanxiety: Implications for Healthcare Workers.” We caught up with Dr Williams before his presentation to learn about his career and work.
Can you give us a sense of your current role in the NHS’s Cardiff and Vale University Health Board?
I’m a clinical psychologist within the NHS. My specialty is eating disorders. I’ve worked in that area for quite a while, and that’s the mainstay of my research focus as well, but it’s in recent years I’ve become more interested in psychological responses to climate change, and the implications for us psychologists and healthcare workers.
Your presentation is titled “Ecoanxiety: Implications for Healthcare Workers.” What was the starting point for this research?
Over time, I’ve come to realise that some of our understandings of why people struggle emotionally don’t really take into account the broader, environmental factors. That’s things like climate change, government policies like austerity, stigma and discrimination.
It would be inaccurate to frame ecoanxiety and climate anxiety as a mental health problem. While any stress about climate change can exacerbate or lead to mental health problems, most psychologists would see this, at its a core, a legitimate emotional response to a real situation.
That’s where the broader context becomes important because it is hard for people who are really worried about this to have supportive spaces. A lot of people report that when they talk to others about how they’re worried about climate change, their fears are not really acknowledged, and are more so dismissed.
I imagine your own perspective is filtered through your specialty of psychology. Where did the passion to pursue that specialty come from?
I’ve always been interested in the mind and the reasons we do what we do. I’ve always been drawn to the topic of mental health, and, from a position of curiosity, why mental health presents in certain ways. I’m interested in how humans cope with adversity. Psychology seems the best discipline to answer those questions.
Are you heartened by the innovations made to make healthcare more sustainable?
There are policies in place. The NHS has set an aim to reach net zero by 2045. As is often the case with any change that’s required socially, it’s down to individuals and services who feel most passionately about it to hold people to account, and to say we need to do something about it. I think it’s very positive that’s happening in healthcare, and that there are examples of this across Great Britain.
From an ecoanxiety perspective, what’s helpful is when that stuff is advertised, so patients can see, against the barrage of negative news about climate change, that there’s positive initiatives happening in hospitals and other sectors to combat the issue.
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