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Detecting climate anxiety in therapy through natural language processing
Lidor Bahar1, Simon A Rego2, Shiri Sadeh-Sharvit3,4
1Eleos Health, Needham, MA, USA. Lidorb@eleos.health.
Scientific Reports
|October 30, 2024
Summary
Global warming causes distress, but climate anxiety is rarely discussed in therapy. A study found climate topics in only 0.3% of sessions, indicating a gap in mental health care for climate-related issues.
Area of Science:
- Mental Health
- Environmental Psychology
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Global warming is linked to increased psychological distress and climate anxiety.
- The expression and discussion of climate anxiety within therapeutic settings remain largely unexplored.
- Natural Language Processing (NLP) offers a method to identify climate-related conversations in therapy.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the prevalence of climate and weather-related discussions in psychotherapy sessions.
- To explore the relationship between client symptom severity and the likelihood of discussing climate topics.
- To assess the potential of NLP in identifying these discussions for therapeutic training and feedback.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of 32,542 therapy sessions from U.S. behavioral health programs (July 2020 - December 2022).
- Utilized Natural Language Processing (NLP) to label 1,722,273 therapist-client micro-dialogues.
- Examined the frequency of climate/weather topics and their correlation with client symptom levels.
Main Results:
- Climate and weather-related topics comprised only 0.3% of analyzed therapy sessions.
- Clients with higher levels of depressive or anxiety symptoms were less likely to discuss climate and weather.
- A significant underrepresentation of climate change mental health concerns in psychotherapy was observed.
Conclusions:
- Despite known links between global warming and mental health, these issues are inadequately addressed in current psychotherapy.
- There is a notable gap between documented climate change mental health impacts and their presence in therapeutic discourse.
- NLP tools show promise for enhancing therapist awareness and informing training on climate-related mental health topics.
Keywords:
Climate changeClimate-aware therapyEco-anxietyMachine learningPsychotherapyReal-world evidenceMore Related Videos
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