Tomorrow: Bridget Read

Weathering the Weather Mental-health professionals are trying to figure out how to talk about the climate.

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SEVEN YEARS AGO, when I started talking incessantly about the climate crisis, my parents thought I was having a mental breakdown. It was 2014, and the drought in California that summer was particularly bad—the driest year in nearly a century before that record was surpassed this past summer. My dread stretched beyond what I saw in my suburban Los Angeles surroundings, in the crunchy grass and smoggy skies. After staying up into the night reading about melting ice sheets, I began having nightmares about tsunami waves swallowing my family’s house. My parents sent me to my therapist, Ken, who gently suggested my condition was related to post-traumatic stress disorder from a sudden loss a few years earlier, and that made a comforting kind of sense.

In September, I asked Ken if, should I present the same symptoms again today, he would offer the same diagnosis. It was a few weeks after Hurricane Ida set a record for rainfall in New York, breaking the one that had been set less than two weeks before and turning the streets of my low-lying neighborhood into toxic lagoons. After thinking about my question for a few days, Ken told me that his approach had changed: “It would be easier now for me to tell you, honestly, that you’re in good company.”