Eco-Therapy

The local newspaper has a flyer in the mailbox every other week. Most of the space is devoted to grocery coupons and celebrity gossip but the part that I always check out is the weird news section. That's where I learned about ecopsychology and by extension ecotherapy. This is for and about people whose passion for being green and eco-friendly is making them sick from worry about doing harm to the planet. Fascinating and scary when you think about what happens when a well intentioned message is repeated so many times that it causes in hysteria.

This reminds me of my friend Shree who went into depression in her early teens over the income inequality and poverty in India. Just like it is impossible to remain unaware of climate crisis and global warming in this day and age, there is no way a middle class kid could grow up in India and not see how the underprivileged live their lives.

The adults thought it was just one of those adolescent hormone things that would run its course and all would be well. That did not quite happen and no one knows exactly how to make her happy without eliminating poverty. Maybe she needed something like ecotherapy twenty years ago. Instead everyone settled for labeling her "highly odd".