ABSTRACT
Using extensive research, interviews with program leaders, and examples, Preventing and Healing Climate Traumas is a step-by-step guide for organizing community-based, culturally tailored, population-level mental wellness and resilience-building initiatives to prevent and heal individual and collective climate traumas.
This book describes how to use a public health approach to build universal capacity for mental wellness and transformational resilience by engaging community members in building robust social support networks, making a just transition by regenerating local physical/built, economic, and ecological systems, learning how trauma and toxic stress can affect their body, mind, and emotions as well as age and culturally tailored mental wellness and resilience skills, and organizing group and community-minded events that help residents heal their traumas. These actions build community cohesion and efficacy as residents also engage in solutions to the climate emergency.
This book is essential reading for grassroots, civic, non-profit, private, and public sector mental health, human services, disaster management, climate, faith, education, and other professionals, as well as members of the public concerned about these issues. Readers will come away from this book with practical methods—based on real-world examples—that they can use to organize and facilitate community-based initiatives that prevent and heal mental health and psycho-social-spiritual problems and reduce contributions to the climate crisis.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|56 pages
A Public Health Approach is Required to Build Population-Level Capacity for Mental Wellness and Transformational Resilience for the Long Climate Emergency
chapter Chapter 2|18 pages
The Causes and Consequences of Individual, Community, and Societal Traumas
part II|54 pages
Organizing and Operating Community-Based Initiatives that Build Universal Capacity for Mental Wellness and Transformational Resilience
chapter Chapter 5|16 pages
Begin Building Community Capacity for Mental Wellness and Transformational Resilience
part III|107 pages
The Five Foundational Areas RCCs Must Emphasize to Enhance Universal Mental Wellness and Transformational Resilience for the Climate Emergency