Based on earlier empirical research, the main aim of this chapter is to argue for the importance of promoting meaning-focused coping and constructive hope in relation to climate change among young people. We start by describing the role of meaning and positive emotions like hope in the coping process and how meaning-focused coping and constructive hope are interrelated. Thereafter, we describe several aspects of meaning-focused coping in relation to the climate threat and show that this way of coping is associated with both mental well-being and climate change engagement. We also review some studies that demonstrate how collective climate engagement can give hope and meaning to young activists. The chapter also aims to discuss the practical implications of these studies, both for different groups of adults who want to communicate with youth about climate change in a constructive way (like parents and teachers) and for young people themselves. We finish the chapter by emphasizing the need for promoting critical emotional awareness where it is acknowledged that emotions and coping are not solely individual experiences but are also influenced by cultural emotion norms, gender norms, and power. The age groups in focus are adolescents and emerging adults.

Indigenous communities inherit a disproportionate burden of risks associated with climate change impacts, largely due to social and ecological determinants of health consistent with enduring architecture of settler-colonialism. Indigenous youth, then, must contend with histories of dispossession, loss, and historical trauma while also shouldering the reality of climate change that threatens their livelihoods and those of their communities. This chapter discusses the historical implications of colonialism on Indigenous youth mental health, while also considering the direct and indirect climate impacts on Indigenous youth wellness and mental health, particularly from a social and ecological determinants of health perspective. In addition, the authors advance that ethical principles and calls to action to privilege health equity promote the adaptive capacity of Indigenous youth and their communities. Finally, this chapter concludes with recognizing how Indigenous epistemologies and kinship systems can promote health and well-being of Indigenous youth, while also improving planetary health in the process.

This chapter explores the relationship between climate distress – particularly fear and sadness about climate change – and clinical-level psychiatric symptoms in children and young people, focusing on pediatric anxiety and depression. In response to societal tendencies to under- or overplay the mental health risks of climate emotional impacts, it describes the spectrum of healthy and unhealthy pediatric anxiety and depression, the role that chronic stress and direct climate impacts play on child and adolescent brain development and clinical syndromes, and the ways that responding emotionally to climate change can influence youth identity development and emotional strength. The chapter provides a template for how to assess young people’s climate emotions clinically, offering several detailed case descriptions to illustrate how stress, psychopathology, psychological and brain development, and climate emotions can weave together to influence the sum of a young person’s presentation. As parents’ and other adults’ responses play a key role in whether these emotions evolve to a clinical level, it also suggests some best practices for interacting with climate-distressed youth to minimize poor clinical outcomes.

Clinical work with climate-distressed youth using a developmental framework is described, from two theoretical perspectives: acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and psychodynamic psychotherapy. General principles of climate-informed therapy are delineated, and case examples illustrate the use of theory in practice. Interventions involving the family, psychoeducation, resilience-building skills, developing a conscious relationship to nature, engaging in environmentally beneficial actions, increasing the tolerance for uncertainty, and developing career goals around the needs of a changing environment and society are described. The authors discuss the need for the clinician to prepare themselves for the challenges of this work, which include one’s own reactions of emotional distress when youth bring this topic up. Ways the clinician can model responses to climate distress are discussed, including staying informed about the multiple unfolding, intersecting crises, and tolerating a multitude of emotional reactions attendant to this urgent situation. The clinician is encouraged to have and use play materials that can be adapted to environmental themes. The importance of providing a secure attachment relationship to use as a base in “weathering the storms” of the climate crisis is emphasized.

Young people’s ecologically related thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and physical sensations arise alongside a multitude of factors in their internal and external environments. This can be complex to understand and organize in therapeutic settings. Cognitive behavioral frameworks can be useful for understanding distress in young people and can encourage cognitive, emotional, and behavioral flexibility in their responses. This chapter provides an approach to eco-related psychological distress based on cognitive behavioral theory that can be used across a range of presentations. An overview of cognitive behavioral theory is provided, with an explanation about how it can provide insight into what can exacerbate and ameliorate unhelpful levels of eco-distress. Two examples of case conceptualizations are offered – one showing impairing eco-distress and one showing constructive eco-distress. The strengths and limitations of cognitive behavioral case conceptualizations are discussed.

This chapter analyzes the concept of distress and its application into climate matters. Distress emerges as a broad concept with many connotations. There are so many similarities between climate distress and climate anxiety as broad concepts that they may be used almost interchangeably, but when these phenomena are more carefully scrutinized, a wide vocabulary of various mental states and emotions is required. The history of the usage of climate distress is provided. The role of power dynamics in the usages is explored. Contextual factors are discussed, especially in relation to various cultures and languages. Related dynamics are explored via the example of discourses about climate distress in Finland and Sweden. It is argued that care is needed in analyzing the usage of concepts by various authors. The dual character of climate distress as both a potential mental health issue and fundamentally an adaptive reaction is highlighted.

Many young people report that anxiety in the face of climate change causes impairing levels of distress. Understanding their anxiety includes understanding neurochemical changes to their brains in the face of rising temperatures, natural disasters, disease pandemics, and other stressors. By learning about the ways in which the developing brain balances safety and exploration behaviors, we can encourage resilience and avoid climate-related despair, helping children and adolescents navigate this unprecedented crisis.

Comics that represent nonheteronormative sexualities and diverse genders make up part but not the whole of the vital history of queerness in the medium. The emergence and uptake of comics in feminist and LGBTQA spaces tell important, divergent stories about the politics of cultural production and interpretation. A queer account of comics history recalls the development of the medium as a staging ground for fantasies and for challenges to prevailing mores; controversies over the availability of sexually provocative material in print and digital formats; the changing significance of longstanding icons amid generational shifts in youth cultures.

This chapter provides a summary of the prevalence rates, patterns of comorbidity, treatment rates and impact and consequences of mood disorder subtypes in adults and youth. The emergence of evidence of prevalence of mood disorders in community-based samples during the past decade demonstrates that BPS is far more common than earlier estimated. Recent studies of the BPS in youth indicate that the peak prevalence of BPS emerges in late adolescence and early adulthood. Comorbidity between both BPD and MDD with other mental disorders is pervasive, with the greatest co-occurrence for anxiety disorders and substance use disorders. Despite a large increase in the proportion of people with mood disorders who receive professional treatment, there is still a large gap between those with impairing mood disorders who remain untreated. The global burdens of both BPD and MDD are equivalent to that of many other common chronic diseases, and there is tremendous impact of both subtypes of mood disorders at both the individual and societal levels.

In the Afro-Atlantic city of Lagos, Africans birthed sexualities in slavery and colonialism. Sex undergirded the politics of emancipation, imperial subjecthood, urbanization, and social differentiation. Africans navigated sexual politics as an afterlife of slavery, living a spectrum of gendered unfreedoms ranging from the persistence of slavery to reinventions of Atlantic slavery’s hierarchies under the guise of abolition. Where old slaving and neo-imperial African and European elites exploited African bodies for labour, sex, and power, discourses about the potency and danger of sexed bodies, including slaves, redeemed and adopted children, ‘wives’, soldiers, ‘prostitutes’, ‘delinquent youth’, domesticated and politically marginalized women, and ‘sexually perverse’ subjects, constituted the polysemic production of sexualities. Sexual politics drove British imperial compromises over abolition as well as colonialist conceptions of male bodies capable of wage labour, sports, and political leadership, as distinct from female bodies best suited for social and biological reproduction. Local resistance entailed age- and gender-distinctive conceptions of bodily autonomy to repudiate elite theft of bodily potency and escape the surveillance state. In Lagos the state policed Black youth mobility, criminalized ‘carnal knowledge against the order of nature’, and used military violence to restrain nonconformist sexuality because it asserted power through sex governance.

African history enriches the comparative study of sexualities, demonstrating a breadth of practices, inflected by location, era, and historical contingency. Despite pervasive stereotypes, earlier sexualities were often varied and expansive. Examples challenge conventional academic categories, revealing the intersections between aspects personal and societal, romantic and transactional, and even sacred and sensual. Some African cultures endorsed varied pre-marital sexual explorations among adolescents and many emphasized initiations that shaped youths into gendered adults. Marriages and children often represented sources of power for families, elders, and elites, including older women. African cultures often defined gender according to role and status, not biology, such as the widely occurring instances of female husbands who married women in recent times. Both marriages and lovers factored into African politics, providing important means of alliance-building. Yet, interests in sexual partners extended beyond these concerns and included instances of same-sex partnerships along with practices aimed at mutual pleasure. Sexuality also mattered to many Africans’ cosmologies about well-being, healing, and power. Some healers gained power through sexual acts, and others through abstinence.