 Good evening and welcome. My name is Mel Conyer and I'm delighted to welcome you to this plenary session of MHPN's conference All Together Better. This session will give focus to the nexus between climate change and mental health. I'm on Garigaland and I wish to pay respect to the elders past present and emerging and to extend respect to all the nations and countries in which you are meeting from today. I also wish to pay respect to the deep knowledge and caring of country and culture for the lands and waterways and all who live within them by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for so many generations and to express my hope that there will be a centering of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices in a determined response. To the climate crisis. This session will be exploring the implications of the nexus between climate change and mental health for all of us. We'll begin with a panel discussion for 75 minutes and this will then be followed by a moderated breakout rooms for 30 minutes, which will be an opportunity to discuss and reflect on some of the themes from the panel discussion. If you experience any technical issues at any time, please do use the chat box, which you'll find to the left of your screen and the tech support will respond and give you some assistance. With regards to the panel discussion, we will explore the direct and indirect impacts of climate change on individuals, families and communities. We'll consider implications for mental and physical well-being and for mental health providers when offering their services to the people who consult with us. There won't be an opportunity for questions during the panel discussion, however, the facilitated breakout rooms will be an opportunity for rich conversation. And in those breakout rooms, there will be the aim to deepen the understanding about the importance of us engaging with the climate crisis and recognising also the emotional impacts that can arise when doing so. Our hope is that at the end of this evening session, you will feel more informed, more informed about the steps you might take to build personal and professional capacity, more informed in understanding how to respond effectively to the people and communities who consult with you for mental health services. And we will introduce you to the Psychology for a Safe Climate community who will be providing the support for the breakout rooms at the time of those rooms, who will assist with those further conversations and reflections. But for now, I'd like to introduce you to the three panel members. If I may, please introduce myself to start with. I work as an independent private practitioner at the intersection of trauma recovery, healing and justice. And what brings me to this particular domain was ignited in the desert of Western Australia about nine years ago. I was walking for two weeks with Aboriginal Rangers in response to harm to the country from mining. And I encountered a profound grief due to discovering a disconnection I had no idea I even had with nature and the natural world. It has led me to this work today. And what motivates me deeply is to stand in solidarity with children and young people to protect their future and the future for all beings on earth. Please may we welcome Fiona Charlson. Fiona is a psychiatric epidemiologist and a health services researcher who contributes in academic, government and non-government contexts. You'll find Fiona's bio and the bio of the other panelists in your conference pack. Fiona will be providing an overview of the wider context, a transdisciplinary systems view of the direct and indirect impact of climate change. Fiona, a warm welcome to you. Thank you also for the papers, the academic papers that you have shared as part of the conference contribution as well. What was the spark Fiona that got you interested in this area of climate change and mental health? Well, I guess it was the nexus of two passions of mine. I've been in mental health research for many, many years, about 13 years. And climate change is an issue that's very personal to me. And when it became very clear what the impacts of climate change were in terms of mental health through my children, through my peers, particularly young people with climate matters that just seemed like a natural progression for my research. So I transitioned my research away from what I was working on and I'm now 100 per cent invested in this in this area, which is critical, I think. Well, thank you so much and thank you for being here this evening. May we welcome Grant, please. Grant Blashke is a practicing GP, the lead clinical advisor for Beyond Blue and Grant holds several academic and board appointments. The themes of Grant's research on mental health, environmental health and global health. And Grant will be providing a primary care view of the direct and indirect impacts of climate change and mental health implications. So, Grant, how about for you? What was the spark that got you interested in this area of climate change and mental health? Yes, well, I've been a GP for about 30 years and mental health was pretty high on my radar. Pretty much from my first consulting. And then I became involved and was one of the co-founders of Doctors for the Environment Australia. And as I started to look at the science of climate change, sort of scientifically minded person, I was looking at it going, this can't be right for what is going on with these graphs. And as I got to know more and more about climate change, I guess the experiential elements. And for me, when I really think about it is when I'm out on my kayak on my own, communing with nature a little bit, and you just think it's so important that we have to deal with this issue. So very excited to be here. Thanks, Mel. Thank you, Grant. And thank you for the influence that you've brought for this rich conversation that brings the voice of doctors more widely. To our wider conversation. And now please let's welcome Anne Sampson. Anne's research career has principally focused on social and emotional development. And in addition to respected academic career, Anne helps parents, schools and community groups to support children in responding to the climate crisis. And it's also very active in lobbying for urgent climate action at local and national levels. My first meeting of Anne was as a delegate at a whole range of seminars, international seminars, which Anne has presented at. And I really want to honour Anne the contribution that you've brought to raising awareness and care for the impacts to children and young people. So, Anne, what about yourself? What was the spark that brought you to this intersection of climate change and mental health? Thanks, Mel. Well, I have to, with embarrassment, admit I can't remember the spark. What I do know is that I have been working for 20 years on children's, adolescents, young adults, development, trying to work out what leads them to develop problems of anxiety, depression, substance use, anti-social behaviour, whatever, but also what leads to them to recovery. And even more importantly, what leads to thriving and doing really well. And then somehow the reality of climate change filtered through to me. And I don't remember the one moment, but it really led me to say, well, really, what's the point of this research? Because everything is going to change so much for kids in the next generation and the ones to follow. And, you know, if I'm not handing over a liveable planet to the next generation, then really what's the point of the research I've been doing? So that was the time when I, like Fiona, made a shift in my work. For me, it meant retiring from paid employment and focusing on for the last decade, focusing on climate change, and particularly on the perspective for children and young people. Well, thank you, Anne. And I'm hearing between with all four of us that part of what informs us is a solidarity in standing with children and young people and caring about the kind of planet that we're handing over to them. So what I might do now is take a few minutes to introduce today's topic. And then I will we will hear from Fiona, who will provide an overarching perspective will then hear from Grant, who will talk about the on the ground perspective and then from Anne talking about the more developmental perspective and following that, there will be a free flowing dialogue, which will we will together explore the various things we know that the climate crisis is being experienced in every country and on every continent. And it's here on our very doorsteps to all four of us panellists based in Australia. And last year in twenty twenty two, sixty eight percent of Australians at some time were living under a natural disaster declaration. And all the scientific predictions are suggesting this is only going to get worse. In late twenty twenty one, save the children published research, which was informed by scientific modelling from one hundred and seventy eight countries. And it forecast that children who today are two years old will experience up to twenty four times more climate induced disasters than us, us who are the grandparents age, us who are here on the panel tonight. We already know that the increase of extreme weather events and the displacement from natural disasters can cause significant psychological distress, trauma and grief. And indeed, that was the focus of the co lab on the MPM HPN session last night. We also know that these kinds of events exacerbate preexisting mental health conditions. In addition to this, climate change is a threat multiplier. It disproportionately affects the most vulnerable in our community who are. Are already at a greater risk of experiencing mental health. This includes, for example, people living with disabilities with frail advanced age, with low incomes, insecure housing and food and first nations people bearing the weight of intergenerational trauma legacies, such as colonisation and racism. Vulnerabilities like these reduce the capacity, the infrastructure, the networks to prepare, adapt, respond and recover from the upheavals. But we also know that when we think about climate change, we need to think beyond just weather events. In late 2021 as well, the largest global study of 10,000 young people who you will hear about more from some of our panellists, 10,000 young people across 10 countries showed that young people are experiencing significant levels of distress. Young people are viewing climate change as an existential threat that will impact their entire lives. And the young people identified moral injury as a significant contributor to this distress. Moral injury can arise when we witness the violation of fundamental ethics or we contribute to harms which we know are sources of harm or we are unable to prevent harms that we witness occurring. With climate change, the predicted harms to children and young people and their future are known. And the young people are telling us they are feeling abandoned by a global failure to adequately and urgently take mitigating actions. And this inadequate response is a chronic stressor, which is negatively affecting their mental health. So what we learn from these findings is that climate distress needs to be considered as more than being caused by ecological disasters. It is additionally the failure to take action to mitigate the threats that young people will live with for the duration of their lives. We are at a crossroads today. The latest IPCC report published just last week lays bare how ecological breakdown is threatening our personal, societal and planetary well-being. And we are hearing calls from all sectors to respond urgently. We also have an unprecedented opportunity to restore more respectful ways of living on earth and with each other. This is where the hope lies. One of the strongest predictors of resilience and mental health well-being is in this context is finding hope and acting in ways that are resonant with that hope. And when we create spaces for hope, it means that we then broaden the response to the climate crisis to include a regenerative realignment of our social, political, economic and health structures towards life-affirming ways of being. A quote from a paper published last year where Fiona Charlson, one of our panellists, was the lead author. And I quote, while climate change is considered the biggest threat to global mental health in the coming century, tackling this threat could be the most significant opportunity to shape our mental health for centuries to come because of health co-benefits from a transition to sustainability. Tonight, it is our affiliations as mental health professionals that has brought us together. What are the implications for us in our areas of practice? How do we have to live to be trustworthy role models? Have we done our own emotional work to be able to show up and offer a tuned support for the people and communities who do and who will consult with us? Additionally, we sit here as citizens, parents and grandparents, aunties and uncles, members of communities, temporary residents on earth, living alongside its many beings. This is not an easy topic to consider. It is not abstract. My hope is that speaking of these difficult matters will educate, empower and motivate. So thank you so much for being here tonight so we can reflect and learn together as a community committed to well-being. On that note, I'd like to please invite Fiona and Fiona, we would really be interested to hear from you in terms of that overarching trans-disciplinary perspective around the intersection of mental health and the climate crisis. And you'll need to unmute yourself, Fiona. OK. Thank you. Thank you. I will just share my slides. Thank you, Mel. Thank you for that warm welcome. And yes, I'm here to present an overview of what we know, what the research and the evidence is telling us about the mental health impacts of climate change. I lead a research network dedicated to mental health and climate change at the University of Queensland. If you're interested, I'll just put it out there quickly in knowing more about our research, that is our website link. So the links between mental health and climate change, they're not straightforward. It's extremely complex. There are some instances where the causal relationship is very clear, such as bushfires and trauma. But for the most part, we're operating in a very complex system where there are a lot of direct and indirect links between mental health and climate change. We can classify these impacts it's helpful to sort of think of them as primary, secondary and tertiary levels. So these primary or direct impacts or climate risks, sorry, heat, which I'm going to talk a bit more about in a moment, rainfall and humidity, fires, blood, storms. So we experience those in Australia on a regular basis, every increasing frequency and severity. We're well, I think, versed in that narrative. But maybe what we don't think about so much are these more distal climate risks. Things such as drought, we're very familiar with in Australia. But drought is sort of a slower onset and a more of a chronic story. We've also got sea level rise. We've got land degradation. From a numerous things that are amplified by climate change. We've got air pollution, which is associated in particular with bushfires. Physical health is also impacted and deteriorated by climate change. And that has a very tight bidirectional relationship with our mental health and water and food security or insecurity in the face of climate change also has tight associations with our mental health. And then we sort of go a little bit further and we're looking at displacement and migration. Eventually, we're seeing this take place in a number of countries on earth, such as our neighbours in the South Pacific and the tourists straight. And there's that loss of connection to land. There's health system pressures and at a time where we need increased access to mental health care, we actually in some instances have reduced access to mental health care. We have reduced economic productivity. The next one, agricultural losses, obviously one thing that can lead to reduced economic productivity, reduced financial security at the individual level, strain on community cohesion and social capital. If we think about floods, how they ravage a community, that also puts a strain on that community's social capital. It's community cohesion. It really tears that apart and takes a while to build back. Loss of nature spaces and that connection to nature. There is a lot in the literature now that has established the importance of connection to nature being immersed in nature, not just having a park at the end of the street, but actually being immersed in nature is being has a very good impact on our mental health. But sadly, we're losing a lot of those nature spaces and it's more difficult to access them. And globally, but, you know, potentially in our region, there's also conflict and political instability, which impacts mental health for obvious reasons as a result of climate change. I just want to talk about heat for a little minute because this is a particular vulnerability for us in Australia. The IPCC assessment report six, which is the most recent one, has really identified heat as a concern. We know that the mental health impacts of heat are very significant and a potentially impact have a higher impact on people than some of the other direct impacts, such as floods, fires, et cetera. All types of mental health, emergency department presentations go up during extremely hot days. We have some good research from Australia showing that. We've also seen in the literature increases in self-harm and suicide rates, increased psychiatric-related mortality, so deaths occurring in people who have an underlying mental illness. We know that certain psychotropics, including particularly antipsychotics, increase the risk of heat stroke and death associated with high temperatures. And we also know that heat increases vulnerability to the brain toxicity related to substance use, particularly alcohol use. So heat is really, it's been identified as a really important climate risk for us here in Australia. So what about, what type of mental health impacts are we talking about? I mean, are we talking about increased psychological distress or really severe mental illness? The research is telling us that this is really across the spectrum. So a lot of research assesses or uses measures of psychological distress, and that is elevated in many, many studies looking at many, many different types of climate exposures. Then we've got our sort of more clinically relevant disorders, the ones that sort of fall into those diagnostic categories. We've got PTSD and acute stress disorder, depression, anxiety. I've already mentioned self-harm and suicide. Then we've got these sort of specific constructs which relate to impacts on the environment and climate change, such as climate anxiety, solar nostalgia and eco-grief. And some of those terms will be touching on throughout this session. Climate change is also exacerbating pre-existing mental illness. So people living with pre-existing mental illness, their illness is being exacerbated by the impacts of climate change. I mentioned that we're seeing increased psychiatric-related deaths, but we're also seeing increased hospitalizations. And there's also a range of potential neurodevelopmental impacts. So I won't spend too long on this. It's already been mentioned and I know it will be mentioned again by Anne, but the term climate anxiety is something that's in the media a lot. At the moment and it really describes how humans and particularly young people perceive fear and dread the impacts of climate change. It's not just existential though. It is real and anxiety itself, when we think about anxiety in the clinical sense is it can be an adaptive psychological, physiological and behavioral response to a threat. However, anxiety can also become maladaptive and lead to chronic worry, restlessness, irritability, panic and sleep. So someone becomes overwhelmed and can sort of disengage. And I've just made mention there again to this study of 10,000 young people in 10 countries which found nearly 60% of our young people felt very worried or extremely worried about climate change. I mean, climate change is affecting everybody. We just heard from Merle that 68% of the population of Australia experienced extreme weather events. But who do we really need to be focusing on in terms of prioritization with young people, obviously. We've talked about that. I've also mentioned those with preexisting mental illness. Globally, we need to think about our lower middle income countries and particularly our, such as our neighbours in the Pacific, those small island developing states as they are turned. The Torres Strait, for example, who's, they're particularly prone to sea level rise but also drought and they don't have the, climate change is described as a driver of inequalities and countries which are already experiencing high levels of inequality across health. We really need to be focusing on them. Indigenous populations globally, including our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here in Australia. And our farmers, there's a lot of literature that has come from farming communities here in Australia and not just drought, but the extended drought but also now we're seeing cumulative weather events. So they will not even be through a drought and they'll be in a flood before the drought has been officially broken. So they're just some populations to be thinking about. So what about where the research is focused and where maybe some of the gaps are? Compared with other health areas, social emotional wellbeing or mental health and climate change has really received very little attention compared to other health areas. Really, this research is emerging, I would say, fair to say. At the time of doing this scoping review, which is a couple of years ago now, more than 80% of the research that we identified explored the mental health impacts of climate change. So what I mean by that is either measured the mental health outcomes that were associated with the particular, usually particular events such as a flood or a bushfire. And it either did that quantitatively or it would do it in a qualitative way where there were narratives from participants. So we really still don't have a good understanding of which factors increase vulnerability or the flip side, which is even more important. What increases our resilience to climate change? There's really severe and impacts of climate change that we haven't seen before and we can't really plan for. There's very little research related to interventions or policies designed to safeguard mental health in the face of climate change. That is an area of research that we're trying to focus on and it's extremely, I would say it's quite urgent. And research I think is just really important. We need to understand the mental health impacts of climate change and the mental health related systems that surround this issue because that would really help our decision makers to develop robust evidence-based policies and plans which will have the potential for broad benefits to society and also the environment. This is another paper we did a couple of years ago now which was sort of a starting point for our network really in terms of because the research is so new in this or underdeveloped in this space, where do we start? What are the priorities? We've got a small community of researchers here in Australia and also globally. So what do we really need to focus on? And this was sort of a Delphi study where we ended up with, we actually included people from a number of countries and also included some people from low-middle income countries which tried to sort of get a diverse group of people involved in this. We ended up with these 10 key priorities which I won't go through now in the sake of time that I believe this paper will be popped in the chat. I just want to finish up by just giving some preliminary findings of some research we've done in Stanford which is a regional community in Southeast Queensland. And it was a, we took a systems approach to this research. You remember a previous slide where I talked about the primary, secondary and tertiary mental health effects of climate change and also the slide before that where I talked about it being a very complex system in which we're operating. It's not always A leads to B. So we conducted a number of interviews with people out in the Stanford region from a number of different sectors. We only interviewed a couple of people from the health sector but people from education, agriculture, business, the council, et cetera. And our question to them was from your perspective and your experience, your local experience, how is people's mental health being impacted as a result of these compounding extreme, whether it climate driven extreme weather events that have been experienced in the area over the last few years. And I don't want you to sort of, we don't have time or the screen size to delve into this figure too deeply, but I've put this here to demonstrate how complex this system is. So I will just draw your attention to that very central focus that was the health outcome that we were looking at, that social and emotional wellbeing. And over here is where we have the climate impacts coming into this very complex system. In fact, climate change sits outside of this system but it is a driver of what is happening within this system. So we've got a lot of issues around disaster preparedness and resilience. We've got issues around people being, people migrating, local spending being reduced. We've got issues, big issues around impacts on agriculture. There are issues around healthcare delivery and limitations within that. And then finally, but actually really importantly is this narrative and theme around the impacts on community cohesion and the role of government in terms of disaster recovery. Fiona, thank you so much. Not easy in a short presentation to try and describe the breadth and width of that complexity. But it gives us an insight into the scale of research and considerations that are underway and thank you for that. Grant, we're gonna hand over to you and let's start hearing now some of the implications in terms of on the ground implications. Great. Well, thank you very much for having me and thanks for a great presentation. Fiona, so informative. And a couple of quick thank yous. Great that MHPN has made this a priority area. Great to have some excellent colleagues online and we're a pretty small community working on this topic. And I also just wanted to make the point. I'm sure many of you are sitting at home probably at this time eating dinner or just finished dinner. And this is a nice light topic to be watching about. Show your family going, what are you looking at there? Climate change and mental health? Come and watch something more relaxing. But the truth is and people are here who understand that we are sort of sleep walking into a pretty disturbing future. I'm fortunate to have run a master's subject at Melbourne Uni for about 10 years. And I get all these clever climate people come in every year and it's like my annual vaccination when I look at the graphs, I'm like, really? So then you have this issue of what do you do with that information? And it's tricky because most of us may included, bounce between denial or trying to deal with it or as Mel talked about, having some time to grieve about what's going on. But I always try to keep up what I call the hope budget and to live with that sort of paradox between realism, being realistic about what's going on but still having joy in your life and putting your energy in whatever way that might be to try and help solve the problem. And that's, I think very much that sort of active hope that Mel was talking about at the start. So what I wanted to do today is just talk about one piece of the puzzle which is a recent survey that we've done, the Climate Council with support from Beyond Blue. And one point I wanted you to take away is that we have the clever technologies to make our energy supplies more renewable to work out how we have green buildings and green hospitals and all these bits and pieces that have actually got to happen in the next decade or two, preferably the next decade. And the real challenge is a challenge of human psychology. It's really about can we get there? Do we have the political will? And yes, we need more clever climate scientists to tell us how difficult the problem is but it's so important with this audience that you have a critical leadership role in the community because you are experts about human psychology and human behavior. You've got so much to offer. So if you're not very involved in this, people like Fiona and Anne and myself and others are always looking for some extra people to join in and help and you've got some really important skills there. I'm a little bit aware of our time and I'm going to tell you a bit about our survey. It was, we're really delighted at Beyond Blue when the Climate Council tapped us on the shoulder and said, hey, we're going to do this survey. It was last December. There were two parts to the survey. There was a quantitative survey of 2,000 people, nationally representative survey by YouGov and then 500 people in a more qualitative understanding survey, particularly looking at people affected by the extreme weather events that we've had in Australia and I'll just pick out a couple of key points for you thanks to my awesome co-authors and we also had a lovely intelligent fellow, Craig Hyde-Smith, who's a Melbourne University Wattle fellow and there's about 20 of them, young people doing great climate research and he helped out with this as well. So key findings. We found that more than half of Australians are very worried or fairly worried about climate change, which is congruent with what we know from the literature and we also found that all of those people who've been affected by a climate event since 2019, more than half of them felt that it affected their mental health and one in five of them said that it had a major or moderate impact on their health. So these are people who've been caught up in extreme weather events. We also found that 80% of people had been caught up in some sort of extreme weather event since 2019. That includes heat waves, floods, fires, droughts. So this is something that many Australians used to think happened to someone else but it's sort of happening in their backyards and their local communities and it's become part of the Australian discussion. Not surprisingly, when we looked at flooding, people in Queensland and New South Wales were hit particularly hard in our survey. When we looked at floods and bushfires, no surprise they're rural, more affected than urban. This is problematic because we already know with our mental health services, it's much harder to access care in the rural and remote areas but you can see a lot of people have been affected by extreme weather events. And when we actually dig down a little bit more on about people's worry about climate change and extreme weather events, consistent with what Fiona was talking about, young people particularly at risk, women more worried and it's not on this slide but people who've been caught up in extreme weather events were more worried, not surprising. Now, what did they sort of report in terms of their experience after the extreme weather events, extreme feelings of helplessness and despair, worry about their family, worry about their personal safety? Notice though, all these issues, loss of community services, worry about employment are more than worries about physical injury and that's a key point. In terms of the mental health conditions, we asked people which conditions they were experiencing. So these are self-report, these are not validated screening surveys and the top ones were anxiety, sleep disruption, depression problems, PTSD symptoms but also alcohol problems, effects on relationships, exacerbating existing mental health problems also consistent with Fiona's review of the literature. What about services? About 40% said there was too little support out there and similarly, we found that about a third were finding it very hard to find the mental health services they needed in the area. So this has implications, we're in the midst of great mental health reforms in Australia, while we're doing that, let's make sure that climate change is not the poor cousin that we actually think about how do we prepare our mental health system? So it's not just reactive and we fly people in, we have a surge capacity but we really need to build the mental health systems in those communities. Just one more point to make on that. One message that came out was that people in extreme weather events, the thing that would help their mental health the most was not just more psychologists and GPs, although that would be good, but actually having supports for the community in the aftermath, practical stuff, rebuilding, insurance, less red tape. A lot of these issues were actually driving a lot of the mental health problems. I'm going to stop there and looking forward to our ongoing discussion with our panel. Yeah, thank you Grant. You've really laid out how many presentations of distress of being currently associated with the research around climate change and the paucity of our mental health services to potentially be responsive to the scale of distress that will continue to grow. I wonder if we might hand over to you, Anne, at this stage and let's now take the lens down a bit further to what does this mean in our work? What does this mean in terms of developmental impacts? So yes, so as Mal says, my focus is going to be on children and young people. Lovely to be here with Fiona and Grant and Will and with all of you. I'm going to go really fast. I've got an awful lot to say, but I want to leave enough time for discussion. So I hope you're still awake and alert and can cope with a lot of speed. But because of what Fiona and Grant have already said, I can skip through quite a lot. So like Fiona, I and my colleagues also take a very multi-system view in thinking about climate change. We tend to use the sort of Bronfenbrenner layers of the onion in thinking about it. So thinking about climate change as a macro system phenomenon, which filters through to the exo system at this level with resource scarcity, intergroup and interstate conflict, et cetera, flowing through to the meso system, community violence, disrupted schooling, et cetera, then getting closer to the child, disruption in the whole caregiving system that supports the child and family processes in schools and in community support. Oops, that didn't mean to go to that one. But I'm going to talk very much just about the child in the tiny bit of time that I have with you. So children are disproportionately at risk from climate change basically because they are kids. So they're at an earlier stage of development, their immune systems are not developed, they tend to engage in more risky behaviors, don't know how to predict themselves from harm so well and because they're dependent on adults, parents and others. So if parents are injured, sick, have died, have been separated from them or just really highly stressed and trying to cope with a disaster situation, we know that the caregiving that the kids receive goes down. And then the other is what's the point that Merle made is that kids today are going to experience not just one climate related disaster, but a whole sequence of them is very likely. And so there's going to be this accumulation of impacts over their lives. I don't know if you've seen this report from UNICEF. If you haven't, I really recommend it to you. It's very good. The climate crisis as a child's child rights crisis, they found through their analysis that approximately one third of all children are already exposed to four or more climate in an environment related stresses, creating as the authors say, incredibly challenging environments for children to live, play and thrive. And about one billion children, nearly half of the world's children live in countries that are extremely high risk from the impact of climate change. Now Australia is at higher risk from experiencing climate change, but we do have better infrastructure than some of the countries that Fiona was talking about in terms of our capacity to cope with it and also to prepare for it. So in a way we're slightly better off than many other parts of the world, but it's still a huge challenge for us too. So the direct impacts of being exposed to a climate related disaster, I don't really need to say this because the previous two speakers have more or less said it, but of course there are all the physical health impacts, World Health Organization estimates that over 80% of the diseases coming from climate change will land on kids and 30 to 50% of the fatalities as well as things like malnutrition. In terms of psychological and mental health, the things that Fiona and Grant have already alluded to as being common with adults are also common with kids. I think the sense of helplessness and hopelessness is something that we really need to be worrying about. But the good thing is if kids experience just one disaster, most kids show amazing resiliency and recovery over a period of months from a single disaster if they can get back together with their parents quickly, if they have been separated, if they can experience stable and sensitive caregiving, which is pretty hard when things are pretty chaotic, but parents do amazing jobs, if they can quickly return to their routines like school or if schools have been destroyed, then child friendly spaces and so on. But their vulnerability increases if the exposure is severe. So if they have seen people being killed, if they've been injured themselves, if they've been forced to evacuate or migrate, if it's prolonged or if it's repeated. And again, as Mel said, the reality for a lot of our kids is going to be that they don't experience just one of these things that many, but many. And that doesn't give support systems enough time to recover before the next disaster is upon them. And the evidence is that kids, when the second bushfire comes along, they don't say, oh, here's another bushfire. I know how to handle that, but rather they're retraumatized and the experience is worse. So it's a worry about what our kids are going to experience. And then there's what we used to call the indirect or vicarious impacts of climate change. As both Grant and Fiona have said, this is becoming less indirect and less vicarious as more and more of our children do experience climate related events. But we know even if kids haven't experienced it, most kids know about climate change and most of them are really worried about it. So again, similar reactions that we've heard about already, fear, anxiety, worry, distress, grief, a sense of loss, a loss of the future they thought they were going to have, a loss of beloved places, anger and frustration with our generations for having created this problem and doing so little to resolve it. And as I said, helplessness, despair and hopelessness. So you've already heard at least twice about this study by Carolyn Hickman and colleagues of 10,000 young people and the percentages who are feeling very or extremely worried about climate change, only about two to three percent were not at all worried. So most kids are carrying some worry about this and a similar percentage felt betrayed by their governments and a similar percentage felt that humanity is doomed. They don't believe we're going to get on top of this. So the authors concluded that the psychological, emotional, cognitive, social and functional burdens of climate change are profoundly affecting huge numbers of young people around the world. And that's already, we know worse is to come. So it seems to me we as adults who've got some sort of responsibility for the next generation really are in an unprecedented situation. We've not only got to cope with our own distress and grief and anxiety about climate change but we've also got to find a way of nurturing our children knowing that they're facing a potentially catastrophic future. So what can we do to support young people? I'm going to go really fast through this but we can come back to it if you want but it's all pretty straightforward, I think. First of all, obviously we have to listen and respond to their feelings and concerns. A lot of kids aren't comfortable sharing their feelings about climate change. They think adults don't care. They don't want to burden their parents with their worries. They think it's not cool to show they care. So we have to find time to let them talk about their feelings and to validate those feelings. Not to say, dear, everything will be all right but rather to say, yes, I can understand why you're worried it is a big problem but then to pair those messages with messages of hope and efficacy that I'll come to in a sec. Building their understanding is obviously important. We might want to shield our children from the truth about climate change but the cat is out of the bag. It's around them all the time now and nor would it be fair to try to shield them. So our responsibility is to help them cope with knowing what we're confronting. So obviously we respond to their questions, we correct misunderstandings and we build their understandings particularly about causes and most importantly, solutions. The third one is hope and we've had at least two of our speakers talking about hope already. I and my colleagues tend to call it realistic hope. Joanna Macy calls it active hope. Some people call it stubborn optimism but it's basically acknowledging that we are facing a huge and urgent problem but we know what the solutions are and lots of good people are working on it. We've solved big problems before, a good time to talk about abolition of slavery over to over partied, women's vote and pointing out how in all those cases we succeeded because millions of people demanded of their government that change should occur. So that's building that sense of collective efficacy that we together can get on top of this. And then fourth is building their own capacity to take action because I'm quite convinced that the best antidote to anxiety including and particularly climate anxiety is action which means we all have to be good role models of doing pro environmental stuff and explaining why we're doing it. We're taking the train because I'm going to visit my member of parliament because treating kids not just as victims but as problem solvers, not only as consumers the same goes with ourselves. Not only thinking about the everyday lifestyle things we can do, eat less meat, put on solar panels, don't wrap your lunch in plastic, et cetera, et cetera but also as citizens. I think it's critical that we teach kids how they can have an influence on decision makers in a responsible and effective way. And then because this is really hard stuff to handle on your own, help them to connect with others and to see how it's much more fun, you learn a lot more and you're much more effective if you work together. Like a theme for this conference. So this idea of agency I think is critically important as heart and colleagues summarized after lots of work with young people. They say developing the skills and having the opportunities to actively contribute to combating climate change can provide important psychological protection helping young people to feel more in control, more hopeful and more resilient. So there are still some people who say we shouldn't let our kids go on school strike, we shouldn't encourage them to go and visit their member of parliament, et cetera. I did a little study with a young climate activist Marco Bellamo where we interviewed a lot of other kids who had taken action. Let's just look at what Alice had to say. Alice says, taking action creates a sense of solidarity of cooperation and productivity in the face of despair. She talked about how she had been very despairing and despondent before that. She says, I've learned how to talk to authority figures, recognize my rights, speak confidently in public, communicate non-violently and how to work effectively in a collective. So I think when people say to us, should I let my kids go on strike? Should I encourage them to get involved in this stuff? We can say it's developmentally appropriate and psychologically sound for them to do so and that they'll learn a lot of skills that are going to be so important for them in the future they're going to face in doing that. But of course we can't leave it to the kids on their own and they tell us that as well. So let me end then with a bit of a call to action. So if we do allow ourselves to recognize that the climate crisis is an unprecedented threat and it's threatening the lives of billions of people, it's threatening the lives and well-being and livelihoods of the people with whom we're working, can we really continue with business as usual? Or do we need to find ways of incorporating it into all of our work? And besides that, whether it's education or in private practice or whatever. And should we also, as Amal has already alluded to, we have a lot of expertise, we have a lot of status as mental health professionals. Should we also be raising our voices to protect the next generations and demand the global action that emergency speed and scale that's needed if we are going to pass on a livable planet to the next generation? And I'll leave it there. Well, thank you, Anne. Thank you for naming the gravitas of the situation, for providing some very practical starting points and also centering the idea of agency because it's all the research you're showing that that agency is really protective when we're in a state of dealing with trauma and it's protective when we act in solidarity with others. So what I'd like to offer for our conversation and we have a few minutes now for some conversation is let's look at us as mental health practitioners for all of us who are here tonight. We might be some of the starting points for us. So, Anne, perhaps the first question for you. When we're working with clients who may be presenting with experiences of anxiety or depression or other forms of distress, what are your thoughts on us as mental health practitioners raising the issue of climate change, exploring if this is a potential contributor? Also, how do we name it? Do we see climate distress as pathology or do we see it as a rational response and how that lens will then inform we as service providers may hold the conversations and support? Would you like to start us off, Anne, with some of your thoughts? Sure, I'm happy to start and I hope the others will contribute too. And I'll start with the easier part with this term of eco-anxiety. I do have problems with that term because it does tend to pathologise it, make it seem like it's a mental illness. It's something wrong with the individual. And I thought, of course, Fiona's quite right that it can be debilitating and really interfere with people's well-being in a very serious way. But it also can be a motivator for action. But it seems to me that corning at eco-anxiety first will oversimplifies it. There's this whole gamut of emotional reactions that we've talked about tonight. All three of us or four of us have talked about. It's distress, it's anger, it's hopelessness, it's fear, it's not just anxiety. So I think the term anxiety oversimplifies it. And the most important thing is recognizing that this is a rational response to a real threat rather than an irrational response. Somebody called it the climate anxiety pandemic, as it got called, is actually an outbreak of sanity, of a recognition of what we are actually facing. And we should see it as that. So I guess I prefer terms like climate distress, which are a bit broader and less pathologizing. And that's the term that I prefer to use. I think for clinicians, practitioners, when they're dealing with somebody who's experiencing anxiety and distress of some sort, I think from the surveys that we've seen of how prevalent anxiety about climate change is, I think it is appropriate to bring up the issue of saying, you know, other things around, other things besides, you know, you've told me about the problems you're having at work and the problems you're having in your relationships, other things about the world in general that might be contributing, and to draw, you know, to feel them out that way. I'll be really interested in the other's views about whether we should explicitly say, do you worry about climate change? I've heard for talking with kids, I certainly wouldn't want to bring it up in that very direct way, but I wouldn't want to ease them into thinking about the other things that might be underlying their anxiety, however much they're admitting it or acknowledging it even to themselves. I'd love to hear what the others think about that too. Yeah, Mel, perhaps I can comment on this. Some years ago, I worked with GPs and we did a trial, we called it the Sustainability Script and so it's like social prescribing that you sat down with the patient and we talked about active transport and eating local fresh food and a lot of co-benefit sort of things that were good for health and good for the environment. And so we sort of grappled a bit with this issue if it was imposing too much the GP or, you know, in this case, mental health professionals' values on the persons that were a bit uncomfortable with it. I mean, it was about 10 years ago and I think that awareness and literacy and concern about this has moved on, which changes it. And I think it's much less characterized as this political issue, you know, this sort of hobby horse of the practitioner that they're going to impose. Yeah, at the same time, there's a bit of me if someone comes in and they're sort of, yeah, I'm here for my blood pressure script and I go, oh, that's good, right away, while you're here. So, you know, it's a balance. Apart from any of that, I think many patients raise it and I think it's totally appropriate in that scenario. Sometimes having something in your waiting room or in your consulting room that's giving a message, we used to have a big doctors for the environment poster up. So that was always a talking point. But yeah, a bit of a balance. I'm a bit cautious not to overstep our role, primarily as providers of clinical care if it's not really on the agenda, my view, but... It's tricky, isn't it? When we know their long-term well-being and health is so much tied up with that. I think it was a survey by the British College of Psychiatry that found about, they reported that about 50% of the young clients were reporting climate anxieties. Serious climates was part of their presenting problems. So I think it is important and if it does come up, then to help them to connect with other people who might feel the same and finding some solidarity, some places where they can share those feelings and get involved in doing something about it. Yeah, thanks, Grant. And I wonder Fiona, if we might once again invite you to take the wider view about us as professionals. So now we've had a little lens in thinking about our direct work with the people that consult with us. But what about us as professionals responding to the mental health impacts for climate change? What are some of the ways that we might be able to use our expertise to encourage urgent action that is needed? What can we do about it? Yeah, so I need to caveat this, that I'm not a mental health professional, I'm a mental health research. But having said that, I did... You know, we have done some thinking around this. And, you know, some really great points have been mentioned already about in the clinical setting, how do we approach the topic? I wonder... And I have a master's student actually who started looking at this amongst a particular sector of mental health professionals. How much... How climate aware mental health professionals, health professionals more broadly, I sense it's quite low in terms of what the climate impacts are on mental health, potentially. So I think there's a role there for health professionals to sort of become educated and aware. And there is a clinical role in terms of assessing individuals, et cetera. But I think outside of the clinical, you know, purely individual sort of one-on-one sphere, there's a lot that health professionals, particularly mental health professionals, can do, I think, helping communities, particularly regional and rural communities where it's very tight knit, typically. A lot of people know each other and they're also feeling the brunt of most of the climate-related weather events, as we saw earlier. I think there's a role there for training and for delivering community-based interventions or being a part of developing that, identifying mental health champions within the community that can really sort of promote or lead a local response rather than what we have at the moment, which is someone from outside of the community coming in and trying to deliver mental health services, typically, as a disaster, post-disaster response. And then there's a big role, I think, in advocacy. There's a national health and climate strategy being developed at the federal level. As an example at the moment, that will come out for consultation in the next couple of weeks. And mental health professionals can have their say and advocate, bring their ideas to the table. So I think there is quite a lot outside of the clinical room that can be done. Thanks, Fiona. No wonder if I could hand over to Grant and Anne for just your final comments around what are some other things that you feel that we as professionals can do at this time. Do you want to go first, Anne? You go first, Anne, because I've been writing down great little phrases from you all my... What was the other one? Agency helps with psychological protection. So you go, I'm looking for some more. Yeah, I don't know. I think there are lots of things we can think of talking about advocacy, you know, if we belong to organisations we can work within those organisations to get them to put our position statements and disseminate those widely and to go to see the Minister for Health and Mental Health and everyone else with those, making those statements. I think that's another really good thing to do. You know, being able to just go and visit your member of parliament and say, I'm a mental health professional and this is what I experience, both for myself personally and as a professional and in my professional life, it makes a huge difference to be able to do that and we get listened to. So I think that's another really useful thing to do. I suppose the other thing is when we do come across going back to the practice situation, if we do come across people who really are experiencing a lot of climate distress, you know, helping them to get in touch with groups like, well, first of all joining other local groups that are trying to do something about it makes a big difference. I know a lot of people in my local climate action group join because they need to be with other people who feel the same way as they do and we think of activities like we might go out onto one of our big streets and do some chalking of climate science at the same time as doing some weeding and some rubbish collection and then we go off for coffee and we talk about how we're all feeling and things like that I think are really important for mental health, our own mental health and coping, as well as a way of supporting other people in the community. So nothing very wise there for your grant, nothing to scribble down. I think that was great. I'll throw in a couple more things. I think if you're listening, experts on behaviour change, I guess as GPs I am too, we're trying to get people to lose weight and stop smoking and all these things and I do think committing to doing one thing a day is deceptively powerful whether or not you get one of those little habit apps or you tick thing off but that one thing a day might be I'm going to make some inquiries about switching my lectures to you today and tomorrow I'm actually going to drop an email to my local member I just think like the water on a rock approach where you just keep at it good for your mental health and over time that's 365 actions in a year you'll find that you actually gather a little bit of momentum and it really helps with that sense of hopelessness and sort of well it's all too big I can't do anything. One last thing to mention environmentalism generally I've found and climate change in particular it can attract a certain grandiosity that you're going to fix it for those of us that work in it and no one person is going to fix it so you can get your head around that the question is well what's my little piece of the puzzle the bit that I can do the thing that I'm really good at that I can leverage in this area so they're my couple of tips Well thank you and the conference team has given us time for one more question so here is my question for each of you this time of significant change it's also a time of immense opportunity and possibility and we know the future is not yet written and we know as has already been spoken that people in communities globally are working towards restoring well-being to our world in all sorts of ways so I wonder if each of you Fiona Grant and Anne might be able to share perhaps an example of how the climate crisis is galvanizing constructive action that is supportive of well-being or perhaps something that is contributing to building a sense of that realistic hope I can go first I'm going to speak about research because I am that's what I do but I also think it's a space of immense opportunity and very constructive discussion it's also a space where we are it's a community it's a community that's growing so we've heard about how having that community and those people with shared values and shared goals is actually really good for us I often do these webinars and I listen to the intro and I just feel really really quite distressed so surrounding ourselves in this case the research community there is a lot of funding opportunities coming up there is our network is expanding it will be across the whole of the Oceania region soon by the end of the year so I think there is enormous opportunity there thank you Anne would you like to share your thoughts just jumping off from what Fiona said and about the more academic research side of it for me as a developmental psychologist I've been really pleased after having been banging on about this for ages there now really is a momentum among developmental scholars around the world and we've started our own network called developmental scientists for climate action and if anybody people who are listening in on this they've got a particular focus on developmental aspects of the impacts of climate change do get in touch with me so that's one side and it's wonderfully reassuring I suppose to see the build in that momentum but the other thing going from the serious to the far less serious something for me which is wonderful is being a member of the Melbourne climate choir and we go along to support rallies of all sorts we're outside the NAB bank singing about about they're putting money into coal mines the other day but in all sorts of things where we go along and music makes a huge difference so there's the big rallies where people are chanting you know no more coal we turn it into a song and suddenly people's faces light up and they're much more receptive so there you are singing is singing together about the things you're passionate about is a very good thing to do too how about you Grump yeah I really love that idea Anna and I don't think it's without a certain logic to it I do think that tapping into people's very basic sense of whether it's faithful not faithful music or art that creative sense as well as the scientific sense is very important for our well-being and I think that it really helps people come to terms with what's going on for me I find something very helpful for me it's this saxophone just don't lose perspective so the trick is not to get demotivated paralysed by the doomism about it when I speak to the top climate scientists it ain't game over yet but we've got a very important decade and every little increment you know 2.5 degrees is going to be a hell of a lot better than 3.5 degrees you know whatever we can do we got to work out as well so anyway that's what it's worth thank you all and I will leave with one parting comment from me to that same question and I'd like to bring into our shared room something that hasn't been centered and that's our connection with the natural world the natural world is not benign some people carry a great deal of distress and trauma we also know from the research that the natural world is a profound source of hope and comfort and inspiration that when we immerse with young ones in the natural world young people learn to love the world and as they grow up they then stand to fight and speak on behalf of and defend the natural world we know that it suits our spirit and we know that we get hope every time we see a seedling sprout or we see a migrating bird return these are moments of inspiration and hope and so I'd like to honour and both invite as part of our commitment and connection to start to saturate ourselves more with the nature that we do have and to do that with our young ones because this is how we learn to love the world and this is what we are acting on behalf so I thank you very much well, thank you very much well for that and it was really important addition that we did all this thank you it's been I've been so inspired to hear the very wide ranging and thought provoking research that is occurring the deep care and compassion that is being advocated through the work the changes of our ways of thinking and our knowledge bases that is emerging from the work of all three of you and that does affect us in our day to day and I would really like to invite all of those view who have been participating and sharing in this conversation go and have a look at the resource materials there's a wealth of information as a possible part of the next step that you might take I thank you all for your inspiration and for being here tonight and a great pleasure would like to welcome Carol Ryan psychology for a safe planet has been a community that I've had a connection with for some years I have deep respect and admiration for community as volunteers that has profoundly influenced the awareness raising and the consciousness raising of the climate crisis in the therapeutic profession and is taking really active steps to up skill ourselves those of us who are mental health providers in doing the work but also in coping with the emotions that come up for us we face and become aware of what we're dealing with so Carol big welcome to you and the same question as the others started with an introduction what about for you was there a spark that lead to you being here today thanks very much Merle not the spark for me was reading Tim Flannery's The Weathermakers years ago and it really motivated me to begin to form a local climate group which now and sands and leaps and but it was really the moral responsibility I felt to the young people and to future generations and it was if that was the motivator and remains the motivator for being involved in the community group and then beginning to form the group psychology for a safe climate 10 years ago thanks Carol and I wonder would you be willing to just briefly introduce psychology for a safe climate let us know a little bit about the breakout rooms and tell us a little bit about tomorrow morning session as well look in the breakout room we're going to provide a space to reflect on what people have heard from the panelists and we also are asking we'll ask people to consider the support that might emerge from their reflection on what was being presented what sort of support people need and to help people understand the sort of support that we do offer to those working in the mental health field because we know from our own experience working for 10 years offering support to various people in the community who are working on climate change such as those who are activists or those who are researchers or policymakers or scientists and organised environmental organisations that people carry intense feelings of grief and anger and fear about climate change and a whole range of other feelings and that they need support and a space where they can safely express those feelings that they need other people with them to do so and they often need an ongoing support process built in so that they continue to reflect on the impact of their knowledge about climate change and how that's having a bearing on the rest of their lives so we know from our own experience as a group working for 10 years that we personally have benefited as we've gone through a journey understanding climate change it's not just something you understand instantly it's a journey of discovery as you deepen your depth of knowledge and that we need each other we need an ongoing nurturing space we need space for creativity and we need space for reflection so we've now built our understanding of what people need into a mental health professionals professional development series that offers a chance for people to deepen their knowledge of climate change to explore the emotional impact of that knowledge on themselves and to prepare themselves emotionally before they take on the sort of work with the people who come to them for individual support or offer their services to the community we also part of the PD's follow-up so that we offer support to people to connect with each other who are doing the professional development in an ongoing way so that people doing this work can have the sort of experience we've found we've needed when we've been doing it for this time thanks to that Carol because I've been part of some of those circles and groups and it is such an important to have a place of solace for ourselves as therapists as medical health practitioners where we can sit with others grappling with this as well yeah and I guess we also Fiona made the point that the awareness may not be very high in the mental health professions and we're really concerned that people do increase their awareness so that people who come to them for support get the sort of response that they need that they don't go away feeling misunderstood and that leaves them even more troubled so it's really an important responsibility we have to if we're going to move into responding to climate distress in therapeutic working whatever way individually or group that will need their own knowledge and their own supports so we go sorry before we go to the breakout rooms can I just really affirm that in that I've had the experience in my own practice of people coming to speak about their climate distress and saying how when they've gone to mental health practitioners it's been pathologised they've been prescribed treatments for depression rather than their despair and concern for the world being different so I really want would like to really highlight what you are sharing there that it's an orientation for holding space where people's feelings are respected and understood as a response to the world and that they're offered a tuned support around that yeah thank you Mel and it's exactly what we're on about and we'd like to give people a chance to reflect on what the panel has presented and what their own personal response to that is and also to think about the sort of support they might begin to realise they need or they've already needed because they've already been involved in this sort of work so we're going to have half an hour still in the breakout rooms I hope and there are four people from Psychology for the Safe Climate one of us in each of the four breakout rooms and we'll invite people to reflect on the panel to start off with so we'll be welcoming understand Beth Hill Libby's skills and Charles LaFerve as hosts with yourself of the breakout rooms is that right Beth Hill yeah did you have that yeah that's the perfect one my warm thanks and appreciation Carol to you and Charles and Libby and Beth and Carol what about tomorrow morning session the networking opportunity it looks tomorrow is the I'll be at the networking hub which is from nine to nine thirty for people to come along and just have a chat about what they want to know about about what we do the work we do and especially about the professional development and so look it's just a time for discussion in that interval of half an hour so do well thank you and that's tomorrow from nine to nine thirty so that is now bringing us to the end of this part of tonight's conversation before we go into the breakout rooms so once again my warmest thanks to all the panelists and to the Psychology for the Safe Climate team thank you also to the MHPN team and the tech team there is a survey for today's session you'll find a link to that next to chat or you'll also find the tech support will be putting a link to the survey in the chat as well so we'd really appreciate your response to that link and now Emily I wonder if as I step out with warm thanks to everybody who's been here tonight if Emily I might hand over to you please if you could share how my people are be able to connect with the breakout rooms now so I will say goodbye and farewell and I hope that the conversations tonight and for those of you who are coming tomorrow morning that they'll be rich and supportive and thank you so much for being here