Group fosters relief for climate's mental toll

Chelsea Green is a licensed therapist and a child of the Animal Planet generation. As a child, the television channel would transport her across the globe and immerse her into the lives of some of the millions of species across the world. Watching those wildlife shows instilled in her a passion for the natural world and environment. "It exposed me to a lot of the realities of how delicate ecosystems are and what's happening to them because of human-caused climate change," Green said. "It sort of lit a fire under me as a young person, to talk about what was happening." Green folded her regard for the environment into her practice in the form of eco-therapy, embracing the study of how living beings interact with each other. For Green, that means being outside during sessions as a reminder of humanity's "interconnectedness with all things." Now, she also guides a small group of adults each month who gather to discuss a range of emotions — fear, grief, rage, anxiety, hopelessness or hope — about climate change. It's not a therapy session. It's a free, 90-minute long conversational group called a climate cafe. "[I] thought, 'We need to have this here.' If not for the community, [then] I need to have a place where I feel I can have these conversations with people who are consenting to them, because they're not easy conversations to have," Green said. Rising temperatures caused by human activity are changing the Earth's climate and making weather events more intense, more often, scientists say. When Green moved back to the mountains, she discovered a growing movement in her field: addressing the mental ripple effects of the changing climate and extreme weather events that come in its wake. Green learned specifically about climate cafes when she became a certified climate-aware therapist through the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America. "For me, it was just, I need to know that there are other practitioners that are having these conversations, because it's taboo," Green said. "It feels taboo, and yet it's in the air that we breathe." The first climate cafe Green led at Philosopher's House in Johnson City was in October 2024. It had been scheduled before Hurricane Helene hit and caused fatal flooding throughout the region a few weeks prior. "When we gathered in that first meeting, people were in deep grief and just disorientation and confusion about what just happened," Green said. Hurricane Helene felt like a wake up call, she said, and opened a door for many to talk about how they felt about worsening weather disasters. "So how do we broach or breach those conversations with clients? Or more so, how do I let potential clients know that they will have a safe place if they come and talk about these existential fears and griefs and not be pathologized for it?" she said. According to a poll by the American Psychiatric Association in 2022, about half of Americans worry about the mental health effects of the Earth's changing climate. And more than a third of adults in the U.S. say they've been personally affected by an extreme weather event where they live within the past two years, according to a 2025 Gallup poll. That's increased by 4% compared to 2022 and 2023. "There's whole communities who've had their entire livelihoods and their sense of place completely upended," said Rebecca Weston, co-executive director of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America. The Climate Psychology Alliance of North America is an organization of clinicians who want to address the mental health impacts of the climate crisis, including how people are affected by extreme weather. When an entire region is transformed by an extreme weather event suddenly and negatively, Weston said it can leave an array of emotional and logistical needs within those communities. The CPA-NA's goal is to help with those needs. And climate cafes can be one piece of that puzzle. "What climate cafes really offer is a nonjudgmental place for people to really explore the feelings they have about the crisis," Weston said. Green said the climate cafe has been a "community builder." "We are a place where people can bring their emotional struggles and have them heard, reflected back and validated so that they can go do the action or the behavior change that they feel motivated to do, but maybe have felt too overwhelmed by anxiety, helplessness or hopelessness," Green said. The climate cafe doesn't focus on activism. It's a place to find relief or community. Green said attendees over the last year have shared that the group has made them feel less lonely. The goal is to give people a safe place to be honest with each other and themselves, she said. "To name grief is to work on it," said Green. "To be able to talk about the feelings that are keeping us stuck actually helps us get unstuck."