What happens when you set up a climate anxiety counseling booth?
Kate Schapira shares a decade of observations from talking to the public about their climate distress
Do you remember the Peanuts comic strip by Charles M. Schulz?
Everyone in the Peanuts world is a child. One of those children, Lucy von Pelt, opens a public booth with a sign that reads “The Doctor Is In”, where she charges people 5 cents for psychiatric help.
Many decades after Schulz created this comic, Kate Schapira, a writing professor in Rhode Island, was struggling immensely with newfound climate distress after reading an article about disappearing coral reefs. But she happened to be married to a cartoonist who had a lot of Peanuts books lying around their house. And in 2014, her idea for a climate anxiety counseling booth took shape. Ten years later, Kate has had endless conversations with regular people about what scares them about the climate crisis and why. She’s compiled some key reflections in a book called Lessons from the Climate Counseling Booth, out this April.
GD: What made you come up with the idea for a booth, as opposed to any other kind of medium?
KS: One thing that really drew me to it is that Lucy Van Pelt, who runs the psychiatric-help-for-five-cents operation, is wildly underqualified for that work. She's a child. I think there's even a moment in the strip when somebody asks her “are you really a psychiatrist?” And her response is, “was the lemonade ever any good”?
So I like that lineage of someone who was not qualified for what they were doing, but was trying anyway, because I think the truth about meeting the overlapping, multiplying, escalating challenges of the climate-changed future is that nobody is qualified for it. But all people have elements of what they're good at and what they understand, what they think about, where their courage is, where their skill is, that does qualify them to meet this situation in combination with other people.
GD: What was your own state of anxiety like at that time?
KS: Oh, massive. I was crying a lot. Reading the news, crying some more, crying at dinner, crying at work. I would try to explain to people why I was so distressed and it just was really hard to have those conversations. People recognized climate change as a reality, but weren't feeling it to the same degree. And they didn't really know what to do with how upset I was. And so I started asking myself, “are other people feeling this way at all? Are they worried about this? And if not, what are they worried about?”
And that's a question that I will sometimes start with. When I do the booth and people stop, I'll ask people about their climate anxieties. But also, “is there anything else you're worried about today?” A lot of people who stop will talk about housing, services for a kid with disabilities, getting pain medication for their tooth pain, or being able to see a dentist. So if those are things that are highly present for you, and you haven't been displaced by a tornado or a wildfire, then those things are pushing that knowledge (even if you have it and feel something about it) out of your mind.
And sometimes if it feels appropriate, I'll say, “hey, climate change and the thing that you're talking about actually have the same sources. They're results of the same governmental choices. They're results of the same economic choices. They have the same birthplace”. Because it's something that can tend to fall out of the bottom of the conversation.
Lately, Kate has noticed a shift in how people think and talk about climate.
KS: A lot of people just need to talk to another human being because they're insufficiently tended to and they're insufficiently listened to in the other aspects of their life.
When I started, a lot of people were thinking of climate change as something that happens far away, or to people in island nations. And if it’s happening to animals, it's happening to polar bears, not squirrels and pigeons. But somebody I think about a lot was a guy who came by in the very first season of the booth in 2014, who spoke about how at night it was so hot that his kid couldn't sleep. His kid had some developmental disabilities, so it wasn’t always easy for them to communicate together. And he talked about how helpless he felt not being able to create a situation where his kid could rest.
Over time, there have been more and more people like that guy – there’s been a shift from people feeling and recognizing it as something that's very remote from them to something that’s more present in the realities that they see and feel. When I was doing the booth the first few years, a lot of people would be like, “oh, well, but you know New England weather, it changes every five minutes!” I'm not getting people saying that to me anymore.
GD: What’s been the impact of the booth on your own mental health? It’s helped a lot of other people, but how has it helped you?
KS: One of my goals going in was just to see if I was alone or not. And I found out that I absolutely was not. And that was a big help. But it also helped me zero in on what was causing the aloneness, and how that might be remedied.
So doing the booth led to someone stopping and saying, “hey, there are people trying to build a liquefied natural gas facility in the Port of Providence. Do you want to come to a meeting about it?” Basically just saying like, okay, you care about this and we need people. And here's this opportunity to push back against fossil fuel development. So I went and worked on that for over two years with those people and we lost – that facility was built and is in operation. But I learned a lot about being involved with a collective response to climate change. What it's like to work with people you agree with, disagree with, like, don't like, and how to find the place where your efforts can overlap, how to channel and harness the skills that you have and set them up so that they're complementing the skills that other people have, what can be done through direct action, what can be done through the courts, what can be done through legislation.
That improved my mental health because I was out participating in the world all of a sudden. Instead of being hit by the bus of this crisis, I was like, all right, how do we change the direction of the bus?
If you liked reading this, feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏🏼
Making Waves
One Resilient Earth and Climate Creativity just opened registration for their 2024 learning journey Becoming Climate Artivists, a series of online workshops, from mid-January to the end of April. If you’re a student, an aspiring artist, or a young professional interested in exploring the power of art and storytelling in creating climate resilient future - get involved with one click
Become a Climate Circle Host is a free online training on January 23rd, 2024 open to all people with experience in climate change work or activism by One Resilient Earth - enroll for free here
Climate Psychology Alliance of North America (CPA-NA) is proud to host Bill McKibben in an online conversation entitled Keeping Planet, Country, Heart and Soul Together on Wednesday, January 24th at 7:30pm ET. Tickets available at four different levels (seed, sprout, branch and tree) from $35-$100 - get your ticket here
+ we’re celebrating this week because our Founder Britt Wray just got back from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine in Washington D.C. where she was honoured by the academies and Schmidt Futures with the top award for Excellence in Science Communications in the category of Early Career Research Scientist. She was awarded this based on her work communicating about climate change and mental health via this newsletter, her book that gives us our name: Generation Dread, and for her research that formed the backbone of the documentary The Climate Baby Dilemma. Thank you for being part of this journey!
As always, you can share your thoughts and reach the Gen Dread community by commenting on this article or replying to this email. You can also follow along on Twitter and Instagram or support or work with a one-time donation through our partner, Small Change Fund.
‘Till next time!
I love how the author turned her anxiety into action which helped her find community and improved her mental health. For me, to have hope requires I act, just like the author.
Thanks for this. Kate's story and practice is powerful. Sensemaking and weaving meaning into these times is a vital to cultivating community and diverse kinds of relevant action. I will be ordering her book. I also have GenDread on my mind to reach out to with respect to whether and how some collaboration might be fruitful with what we are doing at the Synergia Institute www.synergiainstitute.org.