Climate Therapists Learn Standup to Cope With Crisis Anxiety
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- Belina Raffy developed 'Sustainable Stand Up' over a decade ago after seeing An Inconvenient Truth, and has since taught the course internationally to NASA climate scientists, human rights lawyers, Extinction Rebellion activists and humanitarian workers.
- The Climate Psychology Alliance commissioned this seven-week online course — six participants, five therapists and the author — starting in mid-March and culminating in a live online show.
- The course's 'loving comedy' approach teaches students to build a 'circle of expectation' before leaping outside it, and frames the goal as coming from 'I love myself. I love the audience. The system is silly.'
- The UK's NHS has begun offering standup classes as a mental health intervention through its expanding 'social prescribing' program, which refers patients to non-clinical activities like exercise or art classes for holistic wellbeing.
- Karen Taylor, Jessica Bleuer and Jeremy Lehrer — a Hartford trauma therapist, a Montreal drama therapy professor and a Brooklyn therapist — joined the author, each drawn by the chance to combine play and creativity with climate psychology work.
- The author channeled her anxiety about AI into a bit imagining universities requiring knitting as a 'radical woke ideology' and manosphere influencers 'fibermaxxing' by raising their own sheep and spinning their own wool.
Why it matters: The UK NHS now formally prescribes standup comedy as a mental health intervention through social prescribing — a concrete institutional shift that legitimizes humor-based group work for treating distress tied to large-scale crises. Raffy's course, which has already trained NASA climate scientists, human rights lawyers and Extinction Rebellion activists, shows that model spreading into professional climate and humanitarian fields where burnout is chronic.
