Mental Health Liberation: Tools for Climate Activists

Facing the reality of the climate emergency can be emotionally challenging for everyone. We need places to address this for ourselves. Sustaining All Life/United to End Racism can provide tools to help us with our own big feelings about the climate, and gain flexibility to think and communicate more effectively with others who have big feelings as well.

These emotional challenges can get in the way of us acting out of hopefulness, connection and compassion. Despair and discouragement can paralyze us to such an extent that we can feel powerless to stand with others and lead with unity and a vision of what is possible.

Mental health oppression enforces conformity and can make people less likely to act against authority or resist oppression. It targets those who look upset, labels them, and promotes psychiatric drugs as solutions to their difficulties instead of addressing actual problems in society and offering natural emotional healing. Mental health oppression suppresses people’s emotions and their ability to think freely. 

In this workshop we will: 

• Provide information about the mechanisms of mental health oppression and ways to counter them
• Create safe spaces to talk, listen and support each other
• Build skills and capacities to be able to assist others to do the same 

Many people react to the climate crisis by either going numb or feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem and becoming passive. Because of mental health oppression, most people don’t get to release their painful emotions, including their fears, and move forward to take action. Instead, we get stuck. Mental health oppression keeps us afraid of our emotions and separated from other people, and therefore less effective in organizing to make big changes.  

The environmental crisis cannot be resolved without also working to end oppression, including racism, genocide toward Indigenous peoples, classism, and sexism. The impact of environmental destruction and the climate emergency falls most heavily on people targeted by these oppressions. Oppression also divides people from others who have the same interests and sets everyone against one another. Mental health oppression also targets those who resist these oppressions.  It interferes with a united response to the environmental crisis.

Sustaining All Life and United to End Racism use the tools of Re-evaluation Counseling to heal these divisions on an individual basis using our inherent healing process. This involves crying, laughing and talking about past hurtful experiences. It works best in a caring and supportive environment. Emotional release often allows us to open our minds, re-examine our behavior, and reject misinformation about ourselves and others.

Host or Publisher Diane Shisk