Helping kids navigate climate change distress

CAMH program to connect youth with solutions

- KATE ALLEN

Swelen Andari is the senior manager of climate resilience and youth mental health at The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, the first position at the organization designed specifically to address climate change's impact on wellbeing.

For years, Swelen Andari kept a boundary between her professional and personal lives.

In her work life, she held roles at The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) that revolved around improving mental health services for young people. Trained as a creative arts therapist, she had always loved working with young people: "it's a really special time, but it's a vulnerable time." 

In her free hours, Andari, 36, was pouring her energy into climate advocacy. She had been deeply shaken after reading about a 2018 UN report that enumerated the catastrophic consequences of tipping past 15 degrees of global warming, and how little time we have to make changes and avoid that fate. Andari was soon organizing with grassroots groups at both a local and national level.

Then the pandemic hit. Stuck at home, communicating through screens, with both her work and climate obligations ratcheting up, the insidious grip of burnout began to tighten.

Both commitments seemed impossible to abandon. She loved her job, but also couldn't fathom turning away from climate justice: "this is our future." "But that logic broke me, because I had no time and no space and no ability to take care of myself," Andari said. "My mental health suffered, and so I had to quit something."

She stepped back from climate organizing. She spent a year resting, and realized that advocates who show up to do this work already depleted from work, school, and other commitments, who find time by overextending themselves beyond their capacity, are unintentionally replicating the same extractive, unsustainable mindset that caused the climate crisis in the first place.