Ecopsychology

By Sandra Kiume
July 16, 2006

This week I’ll be highlighting some alternative movements, including those rejecting psychiatry and psychotherapy in ways as extreme as mad pride. Not to promote any one viewpoint or political agenda, but rather to shed light on a variety of experiences of mental illness proliferating in recent years.

The International Community for Ecopsychology (ICE) is associated with some fringe ideas, but ICE takes a more academic and less controversial approach that does not exclude medical care. Ecotherapy is inclusive, and involves a spiritual component (without being sectarian) as well as earth sciences. They explain:

Ecopsychology is a new field that is developing in recognition that human health cannot be separated from the health of the whole and must include mutually enhancing relationships between humans and the non-human world. Ecopsychology attempts to bridge the gap between humanity and the earth, between ecology and psychology, to learn to again see the needs of the person and the needs of the planet as interrelated and interdependent.

Ecopsychology suggests that the violence that we do to ourselves and to the natural world results from our psychological and spiritual separation from nature. By ecologizing psychology and bringing psychological insight into the ecology movement, it seeks to understand the psychological dimensions of the environmental crisis and to help us recover our capacities to care for the earth and each other.

Consider the effects of spending time in the country, sunlight, and how much society has changed since we’ve burrowed indoors with computers and TVs: ecopsychology may not be so radical. Explore their web site and draw your own conclusions.