What is it about?
The paper proposes a re-framing of eco-distress from being framed principally as a unique set of emotional responses to the climate crisis to being one of many factors contributing to and affected by the current public mental health crisis. In other words, creating a shift from a focus on what are often-called 'climate emotions’ towards building greater resilience more generally to the many factors that can cause distress, including climate and environmental change.
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Why is it important?
The re-framing is important because resources and effort may end up being misdirected to deliver climate-focused mental health support alone, when we may be missing the opportunity to help people help themselves more generally and around climate and environmental change. From a public mental health perspective, we need to see eco-distress as a symptom of the wider mental health crisis rather than as a specific mental health crisis of its own.
Perspectives
This Opinion piece was born out of a degree of frustration with some of the literature on eco-distress which has often focused on ‘eco (or climate) emotions’, even though many of the categories included in those terms are not really emotions. Consequently, much of the literature hasn’t been speaking to therapeutic practice – it wasn’t helping those experiencing severe eco-distress to move beyond a validation of their emotional experience, since it explicitly didn't address cognitions (thoughts) and behaviours, and so was not offering any useful tools or techniques to enhance emotional literacy and regulation more generally. Some of the literature, of course, never intended to speak to therapeutic practice; rather, it sought to frame eco-distress in a way that channelled anxiety and anger towards positive climate action. Positive action, however, is not a panacea for managing eco-distress; building self-efficacy and resilience skills especially among young people, in my view, offers a more promising way forward. My own perspective is informed from some 40 years spent working in the environmental policy arena and the last 10 years also working as a practising cognitive behaviour hypnotherapist specialised in anxiety and stress, in higher education, and in working with individuals experiencing severe eco-distress/eco-anxiety.
Bill Sheate
Imperial College London
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Re-framing eco-distress for self-efficacy and resilience building, PLOS Mental Health, February 2026, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmen.0000563.
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