Final Thoughts: Climate Change and Mental Health

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Headshot of Anne Grossman, MD, FACP · Assistant Professor, Medical Education and Clinical Sciences
Anne Grossman
MD, FACP · Assistant Professor, Medical Education and Clinical Sciences
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Table of Contents

Key takeaways

The core message
Climate change impacts mental health through multiple pathways—from acute trauma after disasters to chronic anxiety about the future. These impacts are not equally distributed; marginalized communities bear the greatest burden. As physicians, you have roles at multiple levels: Clinical care, community resilience building, and advocacy for climate action and health equity.
What makes the difference
Unlike many health threats, climate change creates forms of distress—eco-anxiety and solastalgia—that aren't entirely pathological. Sometimes the most appropriate response to understanding climate change is to feel anxious. Your role is to help people channel that anxiety productively rather than letting it become paralyzing.
Your role matters
Every time you:
  • Document climate-related factors in a patient chart.
  • Connect an isolated patient to a community resource.
  • Validate someone's climate concerns.
  • Advocate for climate policy.
  • Take care of your own climate distress.

. . . you're contributing to climate mental health resilience.

Next steps for learning

  • Work with disaster-affected populations.
  • Volunteer with climate organizations.

Complete Psychological First Aid training.

Follow emerging research on climate and mental health.

Use your voice as a future physician to support climate action and health equity.

Final thoughts

The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.

Robert Swan

You are not “someone else.” You are future physicians who will encounter climate-related mental health impacts throughout your careers. You have the knowledge, the skills, and the credibility to make a difference—in individual patient encounters, in community resilience, and in advocacy for systemic change.

Climate change is overwhelming. But remember you don’t have to solve the whole problem. Focus on what you can control:

  • The compassion you show to the patient whose home burned in a wildfire.
  • The support group you help establish for disaster survivors.
  • The screening question you add about climate-related stress.
  • The collective action you engage in with others.

These actions matter. They create ripples of resilience in your communities and meaning in your own life.

In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.

Baba Dioum

You are now equipped to recognize, assess, and address the mental health impacts of climate change in your future patients. Use this knowledge with care and intention to create meaningful change—one patient, one community, one action at a time.

Additional resources
  1. Psychological First Aid: Free training at NCTSN PFA Training.
  2. Climate Psychiatry Alliance.
  3. Lancet Countdown. 
  4. SAMHSA Disaster Resources.
  5. Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health.
  6. Climate Migration Resources. Migration Policy Institute.
Glossary of key terms
  1. Climate displacement: Forced movement of people due to environmental changes linked to climate change.
  2. Eco-anxiety: Chronic fear and worry about environmental doom and the future of the planet; a rational response to climate change, not a mental disorder.
  3. Ecological grief: Emotional distress from observing environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem collapse.
  4. EMDR: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing; evidence-based trauma therapy.
  5. Psychological First Aid (PFA): Evidence-informed approach for supporting people in acute distress after disasters.
  6. Social prescribing: Prescribing non-medical interventions like community activities, volunteer work, or support groups to address health needs.
  7. Solastalgia: Distress experienced when one’s home environment undergoes negative transformation; like nostalgia, but for a place that’s changing around you while you’re still there.
  8. TF-CBT: Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy; gold standard treatment for PTSD.
  9. The “Second Storm”: The surge of mental health impacts (PTSD, depression, anxiety) that follows the physical devastation of climate disasters.

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