1 Introduction

The newspaper account was emphatic. A ‘compelling explanation’ (Dalton and O'Malley 2025, 24) for the scale and the ferocity of the fires that were then devastating Los Angeles can be found in a newly published academic study. This study was published in a prestigious journal—Nature Reviews—just 2 days before the outbreak of the fires (09.01.25). Not only did it advance a general formulation that made sense of the ‘savage seasonal swings between catastrophic rain and sapping drought’ being experienced across the world, the study eerily examined a fire scenario for the Los Angeles area that very closely mirrored the conflagration that was actually occurring (Swain et al. 2025).

The study's argument was that the warming planet was generating an exponentially expanding ‘atmospheric sponge’ as a hotter atmosphere absorbs ever more moisture. This development points to a qualitative change as it is part of a feedback amplifying process the authors' termed ‘hydroclimatic whiplash’—a randomly distributed new pattern, that is, upending the established seasonally defined homeostasis. At the next point in the cycle an overloaded atmospheric sponge unexpectedly discharges episodes of above average rainfall, including more frequent floods. This extreme precipitation generates unseasonal growth in field and forest. In a subsequent drought, this massive plant mass rapidly dries out to produce a fuel-dense tinder box.

Familiar with the basic concepts—feedback loops, homeostasis and morphogenesis, non-linear distribution—systemic thinkers are not troubled by the science of climate change. What is challenging is to integrate this understanding into one's personal epistemology and professional practice. Mindful some might argue that these two spheres should remain sequestered, what follows seeks to ‘work the loop’ (Wender 1968, 40) between the personal and the professional in the context of a topical and complex project: What is the relationship between family therapy and climate change.

2 What Is the Correct Name?

Where might ‘family therapy’ and ‘climate change’ have a relationship? An obvious starting point is to consider clinical presentations. In the first instance the practitioner might meet a significantly distressed individual, couple or family who has had a direct experience of a disaster.

There would be no surprise in such a presentation. According to a systematic review in Frontiers in psychiatry, acute (environmental) events can act through mechanisms similar to that of traumatic stress, leading to well-understood psychopathological patterns’ (Cianconi et al. 2020, 74). These authors also note that:

The effects of climate change can be direct or indirect, short-term or long-term. In addition, the consequences of exposure to extreme or prolonged weather-related events can also be delayed, encompassing disorders such as posttraumatic stress, or even transmitted to later generations (74).

The above summary appears authoritative. Speaking in the third person, the authors assure the reader that the response to acute events traverses ‘well-understood psychopathological patterns’. Although unambiguously stated, this claim is more unstable than is declared given that climate change is a variable that is disrupting much that has been taken for granted. This de-regulating action includes unsettling psychiatric orthodoxies, patterns of thought that tend to de-contextualise, and stripping the meanings from many of the problems that are presented to practitioners.

The outcome of an event is mediated by the context of, and the meaning participants assign to, this event. For example, in the field of childhood sexual abuse, it is acknowledged that the traducing of trust potentiates the impact of an assault; worse in its outcome than if the perpetrator were a random actor, those in positions of responsibility have a special power to betray the fundamental trust that they have been given. If an interest in the importance of context and meaning is maintained, what are the implications if the distressed individual, couple, or family have been impacted by, say, a terrible fire?

If those affected understand that this event was the result of karma or fate, that it was an expression of god's will or an example of out-and-out bad luck, it is probable this class of interpretation will result in a different bio-psycho outcome to what is produced if the event is understood to be the result of, say, the negligence of local officials. What brings the issue of interpretation to a high point of focus is that climate science links the frequency and severity of events that were traditionally classified as ‘natural disasters’ to an entirely different class of causation—the anthropogenic. This reformulation has a potential to significantly affect subjective outcomes. In as much as this is so, it is to be expected that the so-called ‘well-understood psychopathological patterns’ the above authors cite will be more random than orthodoxy expects. First Nations' people are the case in point: if one's coastal community is being progressively inundated, it is entirely logical to attribute this disaster to the ecological consequences set in train by colonial dispossession (Cox 2023).

A second kind of presentation concerns those who have had no immediate experience of climate disaster, but who are distressed at what they see as the deteriorating state of the environment. Most commonly, this state of mind is termed ‘eco-anxiety’ (Vukičević and Liu 2024). Mindful there is much debate concerning description, for example, Kaplan (2020, 83) asks: ‘Is climate-related pre-traumatic stress syndrome a real condition?’. An array of terms jostle at this intersection. Young (2021), for example, contends that climate disorder is the better general descriptor; this author also makes the case that formulations that centre on frustrated impotence, depression, anguish and grief have a rightful place. A further question could be asked: Rather than a sign of pathology, is a pre-occupation with climate change about being appropriately aware? This state of mind might even be a sane and sensible response to a cart-wheeling disaster (Furlong 2022b).

If the rubric eco-anxiety is the preferred term (Robbins and Moore 2013), an accelerating number of studies have been published over the last several decades with this category of concern their key focus. This accelerating academic profile broadly mirrors the close to incessant media attention that has been prompted by the succession of ‘unprecedented’ fires, floods and droughts that have occurred over the same period. It is therefore not surprising that a significant cohort have become (more or less) preoccupied, and more or less plagued, by the spectre of climate change. This state of anxiety has only been heightened as many, perhaps the majority, in this cohort do not believe that meaningful action is being taken to ameliorate, let alone avert, impending climate collapse. To this point, the largest scientific study of its kind ever undertaken found that perceived government inaction was at the root of the ‘climate anxiety (that) affects the daily life and functioning of 45% of children and young people surveyed globally’ (Hickman et al. 2021, 863).

Many in the public health field argue eco-anxiety is a mental health crisis. For example, nearly 15 years ago in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Public Health Blashki et al. (2011) urged health services to prepare for the impact that climate change will have on citizens—those immediately affected and those that know about, but to this point are not directly impacted. The Climate Council of Australia (2023) makes a similar argument in suggesting the majority (80%) of Australians’ are impacted knowing about the greater frequency of heatwaves, 47% of flooding, 42% of bushfires, 36% of drought and 29% of destructive storms.

The distinction observed above—that one group has not been directly impacted by climate change, and the other has—might seem convenient, but it is phenomenologically untenable. For example, like the current author, many in mainland Australia (and elsewhere) continue to be distressed that the 2018/2019 fires in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area destroyed irreplaceable ancient old growth forest. Unlike what is assumed in a naïve understanding, this grief seems indelible and has not receded over time. The report that some Mallacoota residents continue to actively struggle despite very powerful efforts to reduce their distress 5 years after the devastating fires the town experienced speaks to this unsettling truth (Mounsey 2025).

3 What Is a Systemically Informed Response?

One response to the growing incidence of eco-anxiety would be to offer therapy at a ‘retail’ level, that is, dispense a massively distributed therapeutic program. Before this idea can be considered, a prior question—one that is of key concern to the practicing family therapist—requires attention: What is the diagnostic status, and therefore ‘treatability’, of eco-anxiety? A self-declared systemic therapist, a person with an international profile, offers an entry point to the issue of how best to frame ‘climate disorder’: Is it an illness, a condition, a neurosis or maybe even a simple maladjustment?

The respected trainer Dr Michael Yapko led a 1-day intensive workshop titled ‘Working systemically with individuals’ at Bouverie Centre in Melbourne some years ago (13.04.16). In the open-for-questions section of this workshop, he was asked how he would understand a person who presented to his office, who attributed the significant distress and preoccupation that they were experiencing to the impact of climate change. The question was, in Dr. Yapko's view, was this presentation a sign of pathology, or was this person's state of mind better understood as a rational response to a disturbing situation? Without any qualification, he replied that this person's state of mind was evidence that a discrete and treatable psychological problem was present.

Yapko's formulation is far from universal. Rather than evidence of pathology, an ecological view maintains it is anguishing to be a witness to the sickening of the planet. This perspective has been explored in a number of ways. For example, the designation solastagia has been developed by Glenn Albrecht, a researcher on the psychosocial effects of environmental degradation. His research indicates that many people report a generalised loss of well-being associated with an awareness that their environment is damaged (Albrecht et al. 2007). Similar findings have been reported from many locations. If the rivers and lakes of aboriginal people—in Brazil, in Nigeria—have been poisoned, local people tend to experience a pervasive loss of vitality and well-being. Similarly, those living on Tuvulu, or another soon-to-be-submerged Pacific island. The response to such trauma may resemble illness, but from an eco-perspective it is counter-articulate to reduce this state to an illness or disorder.

At its base, this difference concerns how the self is posited. For example, Yapko appears to be informed by the mainstream psychological view that the healthy self is a bounded, autonomous unit who, if they are adjusted, feels that they exercise control over their environment. In contrast to the adjusted ‘agentic self’ popularised by Bandura (1997, 2008), an individual who is deemed non-optimal or maladjusted, disordered or impaired, can be therapeutically re-programmed to realise an adequate degree of self-efficiency. (It might be noted that Bandura's image has been prodigiously influential; a proxy for the scale of its dissemination is that his key 1997 text has cited more than 125,000 times).

An agentic view of the self can be contrasted with those who take a relational position (Matthews 2006).¹ Broadly shared by feminists, anthropologists, critical theorists, systems theorists and those who have common sense folk understanding, the following summarises this perspective:

… the person should not be understood as a separate, atomised entity, although she may experience the world in such a way, but as part of the social processes which constitute society. In his most famous statement of this position, Marx writes that the human essence “is not an abstraction inherent in each individual (but) in its reality … is the ensemble of social relations” (Leonard 1984, 23)

It is this latter premise—that the self is an ‘ensemble of social relations’—that informs what follows. Perhaps, the key idea embedded in this premise is that humans are inter-dependent rather than independent. Systems approaches are emphatic in promoting this view:

The more a system develops its complexity, the more it can develop its autonomy and multiply its dependencies. We construct our psychological, individual and personal autonomy through the dependencies we undergo. (Morin, as quoted in DiNicola 1997, 200)

However initially counter-intuitive, a systemic perspective has progressive implications at multiple levels. This ambit includes how ‘wellness’ might be understood.

4 What Is It to Be Well?

Rather than simply an absence of pathology, in the health and welfare sector the received understanding of health is based on a practitioner assessing ‘the individual’ vis-a-vis a certain criterion or with respect to this or that basket of indicators. For example, the standard psychological formulation emphasises criteria such as an internal locus of control, emotional self-regulation and so forth. This approach is well encapsulated in the construct of ‘the agentic self’ noted earlier (Bandura 1997, 2008).

Informed by particular theoretical traditions, a diverse set of constructions concerning health rest on the same premise: that the individual is, or is not, fit for purpose vis-a-vis the criteria the particular allegiance privileges. For example, psychoanalytic approaches set out to assist the analysts and ‘achieve ambivalence’, emotion-centred therapists seek to assist clients to be emotionally in flow and Reichian practitioners target problematic muscular rigidities. Even less empirical is the construct of ‘self-actualisation’. For the current exercise, this autarchic icon is noted as it categorically dismisses the importance of connection, such as food and shelter, as a ‘deficit need’ (Maslow 1954).

A single criterion tends to span the accounts of health put forward in both technical and popular media accounts: in tough times, individuals need to be resilient. This view holds that it is essential to able to bounce back, to be hardy and to refuse to be discouraged. This idea is recycled in expert opinions, personal testimonies and in public health campaigns: according to the Victorian suicide prevention framework 2016–2025, the key goal is to ‘build resilience’ Victorian Government (n.d.). Rose and Lentzos (2017) go further. They claim that resilience has become a key specification for personhood and a coercive moral imperative in the service of governmentality. Other critics are also emerging. For example, in The Resilience Myth, Chemaly (2024) debunks the machismo trope that individual ‘grit’ is all that it takes. With hardly a blush, it seems that the valorisation of resilience simply re-labels and then recycles the ideal of ‘character’ that was so popular in Rudyard Kipling's accounts of Victorian-era male heroism.

A systemic understanding takes a different approach. For example, Bruce Daisley (https://www.makeworkbetter.info/p/quick-fix-wellness-courses-dont-work) Ex-Twitter VP, disputed the premise that resilience is an attribute that individuals have, or do not have:

True resilience lies in a feeling of togetherness, that we're united with those around us in a shared endeavour (1).

Before considering this idea with respect to this relevance for family therapy practice, it is logical to attempt to present an outline, an intimation, of the meaning of climate change. More to the point, if the term ‘climate collapse’ is substituted for climate change, what is it that is at issue?

5 Framing a Subject Without Boundaries: The Meaning of Climate Change

For millennia a homeostasis has existed between:

• climate regularities (rainfall patterns, temperature variations, etc.) and
• adverse irregular climatic events (droughts, storms, floods, etc.).

Broadly speaking, in this homeostasis deviations from this pattern have occurred at an acceptable frequency and intensity. Along with other life-forms, humans naturalised this pattern as the basis for life niches that were sustainable and amenable. In the last decades the received homeostasis has experienced increasing disruption. This disruption is manifest in the loss of regularities, as it is also evident in increasing frequency and intensity of each category of adverse climate event: heat, inundation, fire, flood, storm and drought. Nature, it seems, is no longer ‘normal’.²

Dynamic phenomena such as climate change do not produce linear consequences: because pattern is being lost, because the climate is becoming more ‘entropic’, it is less possible to accurately predict what the impact of climate change will be in particular locations and with respect to specific points in time. Mindful of this fact, and also recognising that climate change has no temporal or geographical boundary, the trajectory that will come to be traced out is, to marked degree, uncertain. Nonetheless, probabilistic generalisations—trends—can be articulated.

One key trend concerns the increased presence of ‘unprecedented events’. For example, scientists have recorded a prodigious spike in average ocean temperature in the Arctic Circle. Similarly, as has been frequently reported, mean atmospheric temperature readings that have never been seen before have been recorded in many places, for example, in Australia and elsewhere. These particular findings should not be seen as isolated ‘unprecedented’ events as, with respect to each dimension of climate expression—heat, flooding, storms, droughts and fire—a pattern of ‘off the charts’ readings are being documented.

Some argue a pattern of activity that is consistently beyond normal variation cannot be reconciled with the benign image evoked by the term ‘climate change’. Mindful that the term ‘climate change’ might be euphemistic, even counter-articulate, some propose that the terms ‘climate disruption’ or even ‘climate collapse’ present a truer description for what is in-process given they capture more accurately the dysregulation that is increasingly being experienced. Such a level of disruption is hard to fathom. In part, this is because the construct ‘climate collapse’ is a member of a class of phenomena the philosopher Timothy Morton termed hyper-objects (Morton 2013). These phenomena are so massively distributed, so powerful and totalising in their complexity that they defy comprehension. Why is this?

We have been socialised to assume items and events are located in time and place. Hyper-objects, in this case climate collapse, transcend location and temporal fixedness. This non-specificity defies common sense. Deepening the intellectual difficulty is the fact that climate collapse involves the loss of an embedded pattern. In climate terms that pattern historically involved a steady state—a quality of homeostasis that existed between regular features (the pattern of seasons) and an expected distribution of irregular events (droughts, storms) that occurred at an expected and acceptable frequency and intensity. This state was assumed to be permanent and was naturalised as our frame of reference.

The received structure, our niche habitat, has been disturbed by Anthropocentric inputs over the last 200 years. The resulting loss of pattern—termed ‘entropy’ in the vocabulary of systems theory—is seen in cascading degrees of disorganisation where the new normal is non-regularity. One in 100-year events are clustering, droughts are defying seasonal averages, pyro-cumulonimbus cloud conditions are propagating fires.

Lenton et al. (2022, 2025) propose that climate change will disturb many of the ‘niches’ that have been the habitats, the sustainable life spaces, within which human populations have historically lived. This research concluded that climate change:

has already put ~9% of people (> 600 million) outside this niche. By end-of-century (2080–2100), current policies leading to around 2.7°C global warming could leave one-third (22%–39%) of people outside the niche (1238).

If the above is brought to mind—if the meaning of climate change/climate collapse is the context—the totality that is encountered is profoundly inconsistent with the world that has been taken for granted for so long. This jarring difference will not produce ‘well-understood psychopathological patterns’ (Cianconi et al. 2020, 74). Being ‘outside the niche’ is a concern whatever the presenting problem may be.

6 Findings From Social Epidemiology and the Social Determinants of Health

Whether family therapists agree with the idea that humans are ‘ensembles of social relations’ or not, findings from the social epidemiology and social determinants of health carry the same message: In as much as family therapists are in the business of building the relational base of their clients they should keep on doing what they are doing. Rather than a feel-good comment or conclusion there is a strong, and rapidly growing, empirical case that supports this contention.

For example, social epidemiologists have found that the incidence of illnesses such as cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke and cancer diminish when citizens have a firm relational base. In good times a strong relational base tends to ward off illness and, if illness does occur, a stock of reliable relationships ameliorates the impact of–as they also promote recovery from–illness (Berkman et al. 2014). Studies on the outcome for those without secure affiliation re-enforce this point: ‘… loneliness (is) on the list of risk factors for ill-health and early death right alongside smoking, obesity and lack of exercise’ (Cacioppo and Patrick 2008, 108).

Beyond immediate medical concerns, secure relationships carry humans through adverse circumstances. That non-provisional, non-contingent attachments have this capacity is empirically validated by the multigenerational Harvard Study of Adult Development. This unique longitudinal project concludes that positive relationships are more important to health and happiness than a person's genes, IQ, financial position and social status (Waldinger and Schulz 2023). The scientific respectability of these (and related) claims took on an even more official appearance when the US Surgeon General recently published a 70-page advisory on the importance of social connection (Murthy 2023).

A bank of readily available data is consistent with the above summary. For the current purpose, relationships are more valuable when they are secure and ethical. Whether in the immediate vicinity of climate disaster or not, practice that enacts the contention that human well-being is furthered in as much as personal relationships are fair and stable is commended.

Towards this end, a speculation comes to mind: is it possible to reframe health and well-being in systemic terms? For example, rather than privilege a narrow vision of ‘private mental health’ an alternative would be to frame the issue in terms of, say, ethical accountability and the quality of the person's interdependencies. Similarly, frames such as ‘interpersonal well-being’, ‘the ethics of relational life’ or ‘a dynamic balance between autonomy and other-orientedness’ could be considered. The premise for this speculation is that the vocabulary of individual mental health is mostly not the best language for narrating the expected ups and downs of life.

The argument is as follows:

• in many situations, ‘mental health’ is a problematic frame, because it privatises, rather than contextualises, the field of attention;
• what is understood as a person's mental health is often an epiphenomenon, a misleading construction, that misses the point;
• the point is that feminist, cross-cultural and critical theory all agree that there needs to be a balance between the relational and the autonomous self, even as our current ideology fetishises ‘the individual’;
• overly focusing on ‘the me’/‘my mental health’ can be an illusory priority that, over the long run, can be counter-productive. For example, prescribing more ‘self-care’ can be like trying to dry yourself with a wet towel.

A more systemic-relational framing of health and well-being makes especially good sense in an environment of climate degradation. Such a dedicated framing has the potential to support the development of the solidarity and camaraderie that will be needed in this environment. In some measure, such iterations also offer a contrast to increasingly militaristic images of individual health and well-being (Furlong 2017). These images—assert yourself, be in charge, you are a loser if you are not a winner—poignantly recall the quote attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti: 'it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society'.

7 Coda: Looking Climate Change in the Eye

Published in ‘the 'Business’ section of the same daily newspaper that was quoted in the first paragraph of this contribution was an article titled ‘Under GOP pressure, Blackrock quits climate group amid Wall St exodus’ (Brush and Kishan 2025). This article describes the powerful efforts being undertaken by Republican and Republican-affiliated bodies to force investor institutions to withdraw from the commitments they had made to the Net-Zero Asset Managers initiative (NZAMi). The key point of the piece was the news that a ground-breaking alliance of 325 asset management companies was in increasing disrepair. A parallel organisation—the Net Zero Banking Alliance, a group that included Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase—was also reported to be under attack and to have suffered ‘a mass exodus of US members’.

Initially, members of these two groups had signed up to ‘impose ESG (environment, sustainability and governance) goals’ on companies with whom they did business. This alliance, it was reported, is now breaking up under the pressure being exerted by a campaign mounted by legislators in the US, for example, the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. These opponents accused those in the pro-climate coalition of suppressing coal production, of engaging in collusory conduct and of being essentially anti-competitive in its design. Behind these claims was a more basic position: the claim that anxiety about climate collapse is nothing more than woke hysteria given that the case presented by climate science is a hoax. According to the article, initially NZAMi had signatures from companies who oversee a potentially game-changing volume of funds—around $50 trillion. Now, it seems that the hold pro-climate actors had on the organisations that control these funds is slipping due to the effectiveness of anti-climate action campaign.

This is bad news. Even if one has not followed NZAMi or the larger advocacy around ESG, the defection of key asset managers represents a nasty turn of events given there is no Planet B. What seemed very promising only a year or two ago—that powerful leverage might yet hold up a falling wall—has been assailed by a grim antagonist. In so much as this is true, those who have championed and held out hope for pro-climate action from the big end of town have suffered a heavy blow. This troubling situation summons our best selves to be courageous and thoughtfully hopeful (Wiseman 2021) mindful that thinking into climate change inevitably prompts psychic jeopardy. This state of mind is jarringly evoked in encountering the contradiction that is communicated if both the cited newspaper articles are considered: the first tells the reader that climate change is inevitably delivering ever more frequent tragedies, and the second that we are now less likely than we were a year ago to slow down, let alone reverse, climate degradation. As citizens and practitioners, this situation is hard to bear but necessary to face (Matthews 2006).