Psychotherapy and Counselling Journal of Australia · 2022
Climate change-related distress within the dominant mental health paradigm: Problems, pitfalls, and a possible way forward
This paper critiques how mainstream mental health frameworks shape the way climate-related emotional distress is understood and responded to. Kökçinar argues that dominant mental health models, rooted in individual pathology and diagnostic categories, tend to narrowly frame climate distress as a personal problem, which can obscure its social, political and ecological roots and lead to interventions focused on symptom reduction rather than relational or systemic understanding.
The paper highlights limitations and pitfalls of this dominant paradigm, including tendencies to overlook context, marginalise collective or cultural ways of knowing, and inadvertently reinforce individualisation of what are complex, shared experiences. Kökçinar proposes the Power Threat Meaning Framework as a more epistemologically fitting alternative for conceptualising climate distress, one that emphasises how power, meaning and threat relate to people's emotional responses in context rather than reducing those responses to dysfunction.
The article advocates for a shift away from pathologising climate-related distress toward frameworks that recognise it as a meaningful, contextually situated reaction to ecological and social realities, and that support responses grounded in justice, collective sense-making and ethical engagement.
Why this matters for practice
The critique generalises. Any time a diagnostic frame turns a shared, contextual difficulty into one person's disorder, the intervention aims at the wrong target. That is the central argument of our family therapy training in Adelaide.
Full reference
Kökçinar, R. R. (2022). Climate change-related distress within the dominant mental health paradigm: Problems, pitfalls, and a possible way forward. Psychotherapy and Counselling Journal of Australia, 10(2). https://doi.org/10.59158/001c.71204
This paper informs how we teach systemic practice at AkindaCo. See Family Therapy Foundations, our two-day family therapy training in Adelaide, or the rest of our research.