Season 4, Episode 18: Climate Psyched: A View from Sweden with Frida Hylander
image credit | Mara Ket
Thomas and Panu spoke with accomplished Swedish climate psychologist Frida Hylander. Frida shared her journey into climate psychology, the founding of Klimatpsychologerna, and the initiatives in Sweden to support individuals and communities dealing with climate anxiety. It was validating to see the parallels between climate and emotions initiatives in the US, Sweden and Finland and notably many of the barriers are the same, such as the challenge of being a student trying to find a program that combines the study of psychology, mental health therapy and climate issues.
Links
Frida Hylander: @fridahylander.bsky.social
Swedish podcast Två Klimatpsykologer Möter (Two Climate Psychologists Meet)
Transcript
Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.
[music: “CC&H theme music”]
Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness (CC&H), an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala.
Thomas Doherty: Well hello, I’m Thomas Doherty.
Panu Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.
Doherty: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness, this is our podcast. It’s a show for people around the world who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and other kinds of environmental issues and all the different things that are connected with that. We like to say, we're all climate, all the time, all emotions, all the time. So, this is a time to be present with how we're feeling. We look at this in a lot of different ways and sometimes get serious and intellectual about the research and the background and also how this plays out in our personal lives and in our families. This is an international podcast, Panu’s in Finland and I'm in the United States and we do have listeners in 35 countries around the world. So, we do try to keep it international here and today we are keeping it international and we're lucky to have a guest with us.
Frida Hylander: Yes, hello. It’s lovely to be here. My name is Frida Hylander. I'm located in southern Sweden, Malmö. Yeah, very happy to be here.
Doherty: And, Frida, I'll have to make sure that I do this pronunciation as well as I can. That's a beautiful name. Panu, I know you both know each other and have had some familiarity with your work there. You want to get us started?
Pihkala: Warm welcome, Frida, also on my behalf. It’s lovely to meet you here. Finland and Sweden are neighbouring countries with a lot of common history. Luckily, the cooperation extends also to climate psychology and its various dimensions. So, we've met with Frida in that regard and Frida has been very active in the Swedish climate psychology scene. There's a very nice network of climate psychologists, Klimatpsychologerna, and we are going to talk about that more today, but there's also a newsletter in English called Climate Psyched that you have been writing and several of the fruits of your work are available also in English. Before we go into that in more detail, it would be lovely to hear a bit about your journey towards being so active with climate psychology. So, has that interest in the natural world been with you for a long time or how did it go?
Hylander: Yeah, so I'm a licensed psychologist and it's a specialist psychologist in psychological treatment and psychotherapy. But, as I was studying to become a psychologist, I also started studying human ecology, which is sort of an interdisciplinary field that investigates human's interactions with the ecosystems. And as I was studying that, I was really emotionally hit by the magnitude of the climate crisis. I think that's when I first sort of understood, both intellectually and emotionally, like how bad things were. This was back in 2008, 2009. Things were, in one way, looking better than they are now. Anyway, I was studying human ecology and I was really, really struck by climate anxiety even though I didn't have a word for that back then. I sort of struggled with that. But it also got me to really think that this is what I want to do for work. And I was really frustrated with my psychology studies because they were so individualized. We talked so much about what's going on internally and with people's thoughts and emotions and everything and different psychiatric diagnoses and stuff like that. But we talked very little about the surrounding world and what the future holds. I was very frustrated with my human ecology studies because we talked so much about the ecosystems and political ecology and inequalities and environmental injustices and so on, but we didn't talk about how people behave, how do groups, what makes different groups change, and how our society is formed and so on. So, I think that my path to becoming a climate psychologist or a psychologist working with climate psychology came very much from that frustration. So after I was finished with all of the practicalities to become a licensed psychologist, I started to find my way into working with this, but there's nowhere you can apply in Sweden to get a job as a climate psychologist. So, it's been sort of interesting trying to create that path, which I've done on my own, but very much more together with my colleagues in The Climate Psychologists, Klimatpsychologerna, which is a network that I co-founded back in 2018. Yeah, so I'm here due to anxiety and frustration, I guess.
Pihkala: That's a lovely testimony to the positive roots of negative emotions to use binary expressions. Thanks a lot for sharing that and that frustration with the individualistic tendencies in psychology. It’s something we have heard from many pioneering climate psychology folks in this podcast, including Ro Randall and Renée Lertzmann and others. Thomas, what's on your mind when listening to this Nordic story?
Doherty: Well, I'm really appreciating it, Frida. I was going to ask you about your background and if you found it difficult to study and so you answered that question. I can very much identify with that story and it's a very common story. I've just been trying to write about this actually for this manuscript that I'm working on. One way to think about it, these are transdisciplinary issues. They're issues that fall in between the academic subjects that we study and the scientific disciplines. And I literally have the experience where, students who are listening or academics will understand this, you go to the department and you say to the psychology department, professor, I'm a student and I want to study climate change and why people are concerned about these disasters. And they say, that's a really neat and really important thing but we don't work on the environment here. I want you to go down the hall to the environmental studies department and that's where they can help you look at this. Then, when you walk down the hall to the environmental studies department and you say, I want to study this, they say oh that's really interesting, but we don't do psychology and therapy here. Therapists are in this department, so they send you to the therapy department and it's a runaround and students are left in the middle. Tragically, some are even told not to take on this topic, it's too difficult, and you won't be able to get your degree so just do something safe now to get your degree. Then, you could work on this later, but then later sometimes never comes. So, it's a real issue.
Hylander: It is, yeah. And I think that's something that we very much notice here and as say the psychology education or psychology programs in Sweden, they still very much don't offer any training in these to prepare future psychologists to take on these issues. So that's something that we've been working on. I'm chairing a national organization for psychologists called Psychologists for Sustainable Development, which is part of our union and our professional national association. Part of the work we've been trying to do there is to contact the different psychology programs to see what they're offering and why they're not offering more on the climate and environmental issues, but also trying to explore what students feel like they need. And are students even aware that these are topics and issues that are important and that they will encounter in their future professional lives. But I would say it's not coming so much from the universities as it's perhaps coming from us or other engaged psychologists, unfortunately. And it's a slow process of trying to get stuff in. There are a few courses here and there in the psychology programs, but not very much.
Pihkala: And that's roughly the situation also in Finland. The only longer university course on eco-emotions has been run by me as an interdisciplinary research course. So, it's one of these in-between things. And in Sweden, there's been the strong presence of Greta Thunberg and the children's and youth climate movement. That really started getting stronger in autumn 2018. That's when I also first met Greta at the Helsinki climate demonstration where we were both speaking. Well, she's done a lot more of that speaking since then, but would you like to share something to the international audience about how you see those years in Sweden? I know that that's very intimately connected with any climate psychology work in Sweden.
Hylander: Yeah, 2018 was the year that we founded Klimatpsychologerna, or the Climate Psychologists, which we did in March, so in springtime. We were trying to figure out what we should do and what's needed. What's the work that needs to be done or that we can offer. Then came a very, very hot summer in Sweden. And we had quite a lot of forest fires that were quite scary. There was something about that summer that I think made people up here more emotionally aware of the climate crisis because it all came close. Then, that was when Greta Thunberg started her school strike which, at first, she was doing everyday leading up to the Swedish election. Then, we had the Swedish national election and I think the Green Party did a terrible election. But I think they were still part of the government. I keep forgetting, but I think they were still part of the government with the social democrats back then. But anyways, I think something happened on sort of the national level. I think the very hot summer was part of that. The forest fires and then obviously Greta's school strike and the formation of the Fridays for Future movement. So, I think also for us, we noticed that all the sudden, the media also became aware that this is actually an issue that affects people on a more psychological and existential and emotional level. So, we got very busy straight away and I think that was very much due to the forest fires and Greta.
Pihkala: And probably also the IPCC report which came out that autumn.
Hylander: Yeah, I'm not sure though.
Pihkala: Oh okay, well at least in Finland that was a big thing in addition to the hot, hot summer and children getting activated.
Hylander: Yeah, I think that's true. If the IPCC report had come and none of the other stuff would have happened, I think it would have just probably been another report. But I think it was so highlighted by the other stuff that was going on. I think one thing that also happened in Sweden then was that people became aware that activism is also a way to take action, to do your part for the climate. So, I think it's also in one way helped to shift the conversation a little bit from the very individualized discourse that had been before into a slightly more taking collective action discourse.
Doherty: Yeah, this is helpful. I think this is a universal story in many ways that different countries in different regions have their collective waking up moments here. I got a chance to meet Nathan Grossman, some time ago, the filmmaker that worked with Greta and did some of the film about her life and her trip to the US and to the UN. I want to turn this to some of the more inspiring parts of the work too because we've been talking about the difficulty of the work and the trenches in academia and kudos to you Frida for being a self-starter and for forging a path. Panu and I know how that is as well. But it does start small, and you never know what's going to happen. When Nathan started filming Greta, she was just a young girl sitting outside the parliament and had no idea that it would turn into an international media event. Before you started asking these questions in your studies, we talk about environmental identity here and our sense of our relationship with nature in the natural world, and that's a deeper thing than our academic studies. It starts in our early life and our family and where we grew up and our home place. When you look back, what do you think are some of the origins of your connections with nature and your sense of yourself as a person on the planet like this
Hylander: Yeah, it's funny. I've never really had a strong like nature identity or nature relatedness. I come from the west coast of Sweden, and I grew up in a sailing family. So, I think the sea and sailing has always been the closest sort of relationship I've had with nature, but I've never really been going out into the forest. I know some people have it very strong… I think I have that now much more, but that wasn't really how I came into this. I think my interests have been more urban, I guess, than nature related. But I've always been very, very interested in society and I really found the human ecology studies so immensely interesting. Also, to study about the political sides of how we use nature, but also how different groups across the globe use nature in different ways and how the Global North utilized resources from the Global South and then sort of sent back piles of shit. I think for me, that was more my way into this. But I think now, I have a much, much stronger and closer relationship with nature and maybe that also is something that perhaps comes with age, like my growing interest in growing plants and soil and everything. I also think it comes with this work and on a deeper level, realizing how immensely interdependent on nature we are and how we truly are nature, you know.
Pihkala: Yeah, thanks for sharing that. And speaking of Sweden's international contributions, those old Ingmar Bergman films often include sailing images. Listeners, if you want to take a look, you can try to search for those and those also really go to the existential level, both joy and sorrow and those kinds of things. We can put some links to the show notes. There's quite interesting research about Swedish environmental activists. I don't want to go into detailed academic discussions here, but for example, about how they relate to the Swedish version of climate anxiety concept, klimatongest, because that became heavily politicized. It seems to me that it became more politicized than in Finland. In Finland, there was a notable shift after the autumn 2018 and the next winter. Before that, for example, for me it was much easier to talk with countryside people about climate distress because there wasn't this politicization yet. Then things got more complicated anyway, but there's interesting things to be read and also on these global dimensions. There's one article, for example, where there's interviews and observations of climate activists in Sweden and in South America, and how the emotions which come up also have differences because of these cultural layers and global solidarity issues and so on. So, we are all interconnected. It might be very useful for the listeners to hear a bit more about what you have been doing with the climate psychology network. What have been some of your major aims and major methods?
Hylander: Yeah, so we do quite a lot of different things in Klimatpsychologerna and there's five of us now in our little network and we're all licensed psychologists, but we have some different niches. So, some of us are from more of the clinical side to the more organizational side and so myself and another one of my colleagues, we work clinically. So, we do take on clients and that's something that I've worked with in general as a psychologist. Over the years, I have had hundreds and hundreds of therapies with clients. In recent years, they're almost only focused on people with climate-related distress. And we usually say that that's not the first thing to do when you're distressed about the climate, to go and see a psychologist. But sometimes the distress becomes so unmanageable that it might be helpful to also have some therapy for that. We also do a lot of lecturing about climate psychology and behavioral change, especially focusing on large-scale behavior change. In recent years, we've also got more requests to lecture about climate anxiety and climate emotions and workshops about that as well. That can be for schools, institutions, sometimes we lecture at different universities, but also for large companies, so commercial companies. So that's very wide. We also work on different projects. Sometimes we're just like consultants, consulted in and we offer our expertise on climate psychology and behavioral change. And sometimes, we run our own projects. For example, last year we finished a three-year long project which was aimed at supporting young people with difficult climate emotions. In that project, we developed a lot of different methods and materials and did a lot of workshops out in schools with students but also with teachers to help teachers become more sort of well-equipped to support their students. And then we also try to educate about climate psychology. In Swedish we have a good word called folkbildare. I'm not sure, do you have that in Finland, Panu? It's not just like educate, but it's more like we want the people to become more educated.
Pihkala: Yeah, sometimes I think education researchers use the German concept of bildung to describe that. In Finnish it's sivistys also.
Hylander: Yeah, so maybe that's the best. Sivistys, yeah. So, we do that, and we also write texts. I have a monthly or bi-monthly now international newsletter called Climate Psyched. I also write columns for Sweden's largest environmental page Supermiljöbloggen and sometimes we write texts in different papers and stuff like that. We wrote one book back in 2019 and now we're in the process of writing a new book which will come out next year that will be in English. It’s with the working title Harnessing Collective Behavior, Climate Psychology, and Resilience, I think. So, we do quite a lot of different stuff. I also have a podcast with one of my colleagues which is in Swedish called, Två Klimatpsykologer Möter, where two climate psychologists meet with different guests.
Doherty: That's wonderful. Yeah, there's so many parallels. It's really nice to hear. It's very similar to the US. I have colleagues that are working with organizations and with businesses and with local governments and listeners, we're talking about some specialized terms here because in academia, certain psychologists work in organizations and businesses, some work with individuals, some do therapy. There tends to be people that specialize in all of these areas and they're all important. So, it is quite amazing how similar it sounds to what I've experienced in the United States. So, that on the one hand is very reassuring that we know we're on the right path.
Hylander: Yeah, hopefully. I think also, at least for us, there's been no path. So, it's very much been us trying to forge a path and with that, I guess that also comes with trying different things and working in different ways. And I think that also sort of works well with our analysis of the climate crisis, that there's no one thing that we need to do. There’s a multitude of things that we need to do, and we all need to use the competence that we have in various ways and try and reach different you know groups and companies and individuals in various ways.
Doherty: Yeah, finding your place on the planet, digging in and taking action from there and trusting in the process. It's very hard right now. I know in the United States, we have a lot of very regressive politics happening that are really trying to censor. It's really quite strange because everyone knows the reality, but there’s still a lot of people working to try to erase, symbolically at least, the reality of climate change and various things and to address other social movements. So, in the face of that it's important to reach out across the world and realize that we're people are not alone. You know the takeaway from our episode and from all these episodes are listeners, whoever you are and wherever you are listening from, you're not alone. I mean we’re in every country. As you know, Frida, and probably talked about, 80 percent or more of people all around the world in every nation recognize climate change as an issue and want to make action a universal reality despite what governments in small places will try to do to turn back the clock. It's not possible. And so, the larger reality is here, and we are building this larger, more ecological world in all these steps. So, it is something to be aware of here.
Pihkala: Yeah, that's very inspiring, all the work that is going on. As so often happens in this podcast, half an hour goes very quickly and there would be many topics to dig deeper into. But Frida, I'd like to ask you about coping tips in your experience and you can approach this as a sort of combination of just a human being living in these times and as a licensed psychologist. So, what would be some of your top picks for how to cope with the world reality as it is?
Hylander: Well, I do think that one of the most important things that we all need in this time of parallel ongoing crisis is good social support. We need our little collective to feel that we're not alone. I think that is essential. I just sort of strengthen that belief with each person that I talk to that the social dimension is so immensely important and to feel that you're not alone and to feel that there are other people who share your emotions and worries and frustrations and sadness and sorrows and everything. So, I think that's key as much as finding ways of taking collective action and feeling that hopefully, with that, being able to feel like a sense of agency that there are things that we can do. We're not doomed. We're not helpless in this. Right now, there’s a strong, repressive and regressive wave sort of coming over us, but we're not helpless. And we need our collective and social support to feel that we do have agency. So, I think that's important. Then also just to find or give yourself permission to have and feel whatever you're feeling. I mean, it's so reasonable to feel whatever we might be feeling right now. We usually say that emotions are also information. They carry information about what's going on in the outside world, but they also carry information about what's important to us. So, if we're feeling worried or stressed or frustrated, that's also information about what's important to us. And I think that's something to honor in one way and just to give permission to that and to give some space to that. Then, I think the last thing that I would like to add to that is also how important it is to give yourself permission to pause from the big world and the ongoing crisis. I think that very much has to do with this being a marathon. This is the rest of our lives that we'll be dealing with the climate crisis and the other ongoing crisis. We also need to sustain that and to be able to do that. I think that we, every now and then, need to give ourselves permission to pause and to zoom in on the little life, but also to remember that there's so much in this world that's worth fighting for. There's so much in this world that makes all of the hard stuff worth it.
Doherty: Yeah, very well said. I know I'm personally validated to hear it's very similar to the things that I've been thinking about and writing about. And it's really nice to know that that's what you're all finding in Sweden as well. Well, Frida, thank you so much for coming. It's really nice. One of the things to be thankful for is that we have the opportunity for these dialogues around the world in real time. You and I have never met and here we are. Now we know a little bit about each other and can carry that into our days. Panu and I, being able to have these conversations twice a month, we feel connected and meet people. So, listeners, I hope you take something from this. If you're in Sweden or if you're in the United States or Finland or any other country, you're not alone in doing this work. We're Climate Change and Happiness. You can find us at climatechangeandhappiness.com. There will be some good notes about Frida's work and some of the links to her newsletter and upcoming book and all these kinds of great things. And Frida, Panu, listeners, everyone, be well and take care.
Pihkala: Thanks Frida, thanks a mycket.
Hylander: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
[music: “CC&H theme music”]
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