Go Outside to Heal Inside
Exposure to nature has been found time and time again to have beneficial effects on health, promotes well-being and reduces stress according to a growing body of evidence. In the wake of our current mental health decline and the rapidly accelerating climate change crisis, the field of ecopsychology offers the potential to bridge our culture’s separation between the psychological and the ecological.
In the early 1990s psychologist and ecology practitioner Theodore Roszak made the connection between an individual’s emotional problems and the exploitation of our environment. He introduced the world with the term Ecopsychology in his 1992 book, The Voice of our Earth.
According to Rozak, “Other therapies seek to heal the alienation between person and person, person and family, person and society. Ecopsychology seeks to heal the more fundamental alienation between the recently created urban psyche and the age-old natural environment.”
Since Roszak, there have been thousands of scientific studies connecting overall well-being and nature connectedness. A 2021 study was led by Matthew White, a social psychologist researching the relationships between natural environments and overall health. The data was collected from an 18-country survey, exploring associations between multiple measures of mental health and exposures to different natural settings or green spaces. The survey concluded that people who lived in green neighborhoods reported substantially higher rates of positive well-being compared to those who didn't live in green neighborhoods. The survey also concluded that spending time in nature was positively associated with positive well-being and negatively associated with mental distress with a lower likelihood of using medication for depression.
One of the most recent research articles focusing on nature and mental health was done by Matthew White, an environmental psychologist with a research focus on natural environments and well-being. The 2021 study collected data from an 18-country survey, exploring associations between multiple measures of mental health and exposures to different natural settings or green spaces. The survey concluded that people who lived in green neighborhoods reported substantially higher rates of positive well-being compared to those who didn't live in green neighborhoods. The survey also concluded that spending time in nature was positively associated with positive well-being and negatively associated with mental distress, with a lower likelihood of using medication for depression.
“Recent research clearly shows the measurable benefits of nature for both body and mind,” says Thomas Doherty, a clinical psychologist in Portland, Oregon and the editor of Ecopsychology. Doherty has been specializing in applying an environmental perspective to mental health and well-being for more than 16 years. “There is overwhelming data that supports that, in green spaces, people’s heart rates decrease, their blood pressure decreases, their muscles relax, and they become calmer.” Doherty says.
Doherty coined the term “nature-based stress reduction”, which brings together the benefits of mindfulness and the experience of nature and the natural world. In his practice, he uses the technique of walking therapy to help promote healing with his clients. “Walking therapy is a mindfulness-based therapy that can make it easier for clients to relax, breathe deep, release physical tension and receive mind-body insight while processing experiences in a calm environment and nurturing environment.” Doherty said.
Doherty's research examines the close association between the mental health decline and our current environmental crisis. He brought his theory to the American Psychology Association task force, which then released a 230-page report titled “Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change.” “My hope is people will accept the fact that there are psychological impacts from climate change,” said Doherty. “Having the information put into journals creates accessible information that will hopefully allow students and teachers to understand that impact and become informed on the problem.”
“The climate and environmental crisis is probably one of the greatest challenges in the history of humankind,” Doherty says. They not only pose a serious current and continuing threat to physical health, but are also an existing and growing hazard to the mental health of millions of people worldwide. A 2021 study by the Psychopathology and Clinical Intervention Institute of Psychology at the University of Zürich, Switzerland, focused on the mental health impact of the environmental crisis. The study concluded, based on what existing data suggest, that the climate and environmental crisis not only act as direct stressors, but can also exert a detrimental impact on the various pathways in the brain, with the potential to amplify an individual's biopsychosocial vulnerability to develop mental ill-health.
Dr. Renee G. Soule was studying to become a medical doctor when she too suddenly became paralyzed by ecological shame and frozen in despair because of it. She realized that Western medicine did not offer the path of healing that she thought was necessary, so she found a new career path, and became an ecopsychologist.
After devoting 25 years to developing the field of ecopsychology, Renée Soule is building a transformative learning practice that is focused on exploring and integrating all phases of personal and collective initiation in response to our current ecological state.
“In the face of global threats, most people maintain life-as-usual,” Soule says. “Wrenching emotions like fear, despair, shame and rage—the natural responses to the dangers we collectively face— are avoided or suppressed. Psychic numbing is perhaps the greatest danger to life on Earth as it kills our capacity to creatively respond to danger.” In other words, if we are unable to feel, we won’t know to pull our hands out of the fire.
Soule says how many activists believe that information is the cure for ignorance. They believe if people knew what was happening, they would change. But, in the digital age, information is constantly presented to us, but change has yet to come. “Without capacities to work with our fear, shame, despair and rage, endlessly dreary facts and figures become more harmful than good,” says Soule. “We avoid or run away because our emotional responses are overwhelming.”
Soule believes the answer to our eco-anxiety is creating space for healthy shame. “If we can bear its discomfort, it may signal to us a deep longing to make things right,” she says. “Shame is a call to belonging. If we don’t face shame, we won’t feel accountable.”
Soule adds that inviting emotional responses to what is happening in our world is not an invitation to become consumed in “emotional swamps.” “ It must be balanced with capacities to transmute negative feelings into their positive expressions,” says Soule. “Fear transmutes into courage, shame into belonging, anger into fierceness, despair into compassion, and so forth.”
“When I find myself facing personal feelings of fear or anxiety regarding the global threats,” Soule said, “the most healing thing I can do for myself is to go spend some time in nature.”
In 2016, Scott Weidle, a small business owner from a town outside of Dayton, Ohio, unexpectedly lost his son to an overdose on heroin. During his grieving process, Scott realized that underlying mental health issues are largely associated with drug use.
“Daniel taught me he had triggers to addiction and a lot of that has to do with stress, like a lot of people,” Scott says. “When the noise of the world would get too great for him, he learned to come to this property and walk the woods, and this allowed him to reground himself. This was a place of solitude and peace for him.”
“Once Daniel lost his battle I was struggling and I found myself coming to this property and using it how Daniel had used it, to try and reground myself and find solitude. It worked for me. I knew I had to have this place to survive, if I didn’t have this place I probably wouldn’t have made it”.
Scott created the memorial site dedicated to his son Daniel to be used as a mental health resource to offer members of the community an escape from the day-to-day.
“Before I knew it other people were using this property for the same reason I was and the same reason Daniel was. It is now used by many folks to reconnect, they come here during times of trouble, and they walk out of the woods leaving a burden or two behind them.”
Daniel’s Peace is open to the public 365 days a year, 7 days a week in order to ensure that everyone in the community has access to the healing power of nature when they need it most.
Source list-
Thomas Doherty- 503-288-1213
Renee G. Soule- 510-558-8238
Roszak, Theodore. The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology. Phanes, 2001.
Thomas, Myriam V V, et al. “Clinical Ecopsychology: The Mental Health Impacts and Underlying Pathways of the Climate and Environmental Crisis.” Frontiers in Psychiatry, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 21 May 2021, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34093283/.
White, Mathew P., et al. “Associations between Green/Blue Spaces and Mental Health across 18 Countries.” Nature News, Nature Publishing Group, 26 Apr. 2021, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-87675-0.
