Climate Anxiety, Grief, Courage, Hope & Joy

Joint Seminar by the Centre for Global Mental Health and the Centre on Climate Change and Planetary Health

We are learning just how much climate change impacts the physical and natural world around us—but how does is it impacting our emotional wellbeing and mental health? Author and researcher Britt Wray will explore these topics at LSHTM  on Friday, February 17th in a hybrid Seminar co-hosted by the Center for Global Mental Health and the Centre on Climate Change and Planetary Health.

Britt Wray, PhD is a Human and Planetary Health Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Centre on Climate Change and Planetary Health. Wray’s research focuses on the mental health impacts of the climate and wider ecological crises, and particularly climate distress/eco-anxiety. In her recently published book Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis, she merges scientific knowledge with emotional insight to show how the intense feelings of eco-anxiety can lead to burnout, avoidance, or a disturbance of daily function, yet also may be a crucible for community building, climate action, and meaning-focused coping.  

Speaker

Britt Wray, PhD is an author and researcher working at the forefront of climate change and mental health. Her latest book Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis, is an impassioned generational perspective on how to stay sane amid climate disruption and was named a finalist for the 2022 Governor General’s Award. Britt is finishing a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University's Center for Innovation in Global Health, Woods Institute for the Environment and the London School of Medicine's Centre on Climate Change and Planetary Health. As of Spring 2023 will lead a Chair’s Special Initiative on Climate and Mental Health in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences of Stanford University School of Medicine. She holds a PhD in science communication from the University of Copenhagen. On topics of climate and mental health, Britt has advised the Canadian Federal Ministers, the US State Department, and multiple Fortune 500 companies. She has hosted several podcasts, radio and TV programs with the BBC and CBC, is a TED speaker, and writes Gen Dread, a newsletter about finding hope on the far side of climate grief: gendread.substack.com. She is a cohort member of the first Climate Psychology Certificate Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in California, USA and current Fellow in the Climate Health Organizing Fellowship offered by Harvard C-Change. 

​You can learn more about Wray in her profile in Macleans and she is also the creator of the newsletter about “staying sane in the climate crisis” Gen Dread (gendread.substack.com).  

Admission

This is a hybrid event. Please go to this LSHTM page for seminar details and the link to join online. 

Free and open to all, online and in person. No registration required. A recording of this session will be available after the event on this page.