Support networks aim to help kids through the polycrisis
AI News Desk
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MIT Technology Review
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16 min read
Sometime in the late 2000s, Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car, headed toward her great-grandmother’s tiny town in the south of Thailand.
Sometime in the late 2000s, Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car, headed toward her great-grandmother’s tiny town in the south of Thailand. She watched big mountains pass by out the window. She was just six years old but was about to be hit by an adult-size realization. “They were just quarried out,” she says. “Like half the mountain just dug out and disappeared, and so there was just this huge orange face.”
Although she probably didn’t know the word “quarry” back then, she sensed that what she was seeing was unnatural. She also knew, from family stories, that her mother had bathed in a nearby river when she was young, its water so glass-clear she could see fish swimming by. But the extraction had muddied the water. “We’re changing things,” Sullivan-Tailyour thought. “And it doesn’t seem right.”
It was the first time it occurred to her that humans could alter the world—and that they were. For the worse.
She carried that knowledge with her as she got older and her family moved to the UK. There, she joined teenagers from other schools in the Schools Sustainability Network, an umbrella organization for groups that work on environmental initiatives.
But even with those connections, Sullivan-Tailyour didn’t encounter anyone at her own school who was interested in environmental activism. She felt lonely in her desire to push for change—and burnt out on working solo. “I was pretty much the only person who wanted to do these things,” she says.
That was when she heard about another initiative, called Force of Nature. A UK-based organization, in 2021 it had spun up Becoming a Force of Nature, a kind of informal online group therapy program, for kids and young adults worried about climate. The sessions aimed to help young people like Sullivan-Tailyour take their worries and turn them into action, stemming the exact kind of anxiety and burnout she was feeling.
She signed up and soon logged into Zoom for her first session. Dozens of faces from dozens of countries looked back at her. “I realized that I wasn’t alone,” she says.
She began to suspect that kids at her school actually did feel the way she did, even if they weren’t doing anything about it.
Sullivan-Tailyour was right, it turns out: Global surveys have found that most kids are anxious about the state of the world—and not just about whether sea levels and carbon counts will continue to rise. They are growing up in a time of what some historians, policymakers, and economists are calling a “polycrisis”: The planet is warming, yes, but also a pandemic happened and could happen again, conflicts keep erupting, nuclear weapons lurk menacingly in silos, housing is growing impossibly expensive, groceries and gas can feel like luxury purchases, health-care costs are skyrocketing, authoritarianism is on the rise, partisanship splits populations, jobs are hard to get and there’s rampant worry AI will take more and more of them, and pings about all those things (and more!) arrive 24-7 in polarizing digital echo chambers.
That’s a lot. And it’s why online networks like Force of Nature have popped up. Although they’re not taking over the planet, they have gained thousands of participants. And they’re now dealing with climate not as an isolated issue but as one facet of a generally troubled world. The goal is to help young people, who are experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety at higher rates than earlier generations, deal with their feelings about the multivariately changing future they are maturing into.
But the science on the effectiveness of these sorts of networks is still nascent, and psychological scholars—and some practitioners—say it’s time for the field to measure itself. That way, schools, parents, and kids themselves can know which programs to invest their time and resources in to actually help young people feel better.
The existential dread that comes with the climate crisis is so pervasive that it’s had an official name for many years: eco-anxiety. “The American Psychological Association calls it a ‘chronic fear of environmental doom,’” says Liza Jachens, a psychologist and assistant professor at the University of Nottingham’s school of medicine. “What people describe is closer to grief. A real sense of loss—not just fear of what is coming but mourning for what has already gone.”
Lise Van Susteren, a psychiatrist and coauthor of “The Psychological Effects of Global Warming on the United States,” a 2012 report for the National Wildlife Federation, has called it “pre-traumatic” stress; she sees it as a kind of anticipatory trauma.
In a 2021 study measuring climate anxiety, 56% of 10,000 children and young people in 10 countries agreed with the statement “Humanity is doomed.”
But there isn’t really a word to describe feelings people have about the rest of what’s going on in the world. A 2025 study from Polish researchers attempted to define “polycrisis syndrome” in the young people bubbling into adulthood in this hot soup of ingredients. The researchers assessed their reactions to the many crises using established scales of emotional and mental symptoms—things like the “Flourishing Index” and the “Difficulties in Emotional Regulation Scale.” “Most young individuals in our study face psychological challenges,” the authors write. In fact, more than 60% reported problems —difficulty regulating emotion, symptoms of depression, and lower overall mental and physical well-being—that they attributed to the cumulative stress of world affairs.
That finding meshes with earlier, more climate-specific research suggesting that the kids are (sorry) not all right. In 2021, researchers published a landmark study in The Lancet Planetary Health measuring climate anxiety in 10,000 children and young people in 10 countries. Around 60% reported being very or extremely worried about climate change, with more than 45% saying that eco-anxiety affected their daily ability to function. The word “polycrisis” wasn’t in as wide use then, but 56% of the young respondents nevertheless agreed with the statement “Humanity is doomed.”
But Gen Z isn’t the first to worry about the fate of the species. There isn’t a readily available baseline in the academic literature to compare current youth angst against, but previous studies can give some context. In the early 1980s, during the latter years of the Cold War, around 35% of high school seniors agreed with the statement “Nuclear or biological annihilation will probably be the fate of all mankind within my lifetime,” according to a survey of 130 schools in 48 states. Around the same time, a Gallup poll found that 49% of teens said the possibility of nuclear war influenced how they planned for the future.
Those young Baby Boomers and elder Gen Xers were, though, perhaps more optimistic than kids today as a whole. A majority of students from the high school study agreed with the statement “The human race has come through tough times before and will do so again.”
A 1986 analysis of such research, published by the National Academy of Sciences, described how to help kids feel less alone with their fears: “What is necessary for those providing the education is knowledge of the issue, sensitivity to the inner processes of working through the painful feelings engendered, and a willingness to try to come to grips with what the youngsters are voicing.”
That connection between adults and kids, psychological scholars are currently finding, is still key four decades later. Caroline Hickman, the psychotherapist who led the Lancet Planetary Health study, says the most striking finding was that kids weren’t just anxious about the state of the planet; they were upset that older people had failed to protect their future. “Whatever your politics, we have this expectation that faith leaders, school leaders, community leaders, government officials, will look after us and have our best interests at heart,” Hickman says, “and that social contract was being broken repeatedly.” Grief and anxiety are rational responses, she tells clients, to that bad situation.
Sullivan-Tailyour received that message from the very beginning at Becoming a Force of Nature. At the first session, facilitators (themselves young people) asked how participants felt about the future broadly and the climate crisis specifically.
That question hit Sullivan-Tailyour hard. She was used to thinking of numbers, news—not her internal experience. “It’s one of the things that we just don’t give ourselves the chance to really think about,” she says. The facilitators took the responses in and talked to participants, assuring them that eco-anxiety is only natural. “Our planet is sick, so it’s normal to feel sick alongside it, because we’re just so interconnected,” Sullivan-Tailyour says.
In the second session, participants investigated their personal strengths, skills, and passions. And the final session synthesized the first two. “We create a road map for how they can go out into their communities and take action,” says Hannah Hooper, until recently the group’s head of programs.
Reframing her feelings around action worked for Sullivan-Tailyour, as did the facilitators’ realistic approach to doing so. They emphasized that it’s unreasonable to put pressure on yourself to behave 24-7-365 in ways that will not harm the planet.
Conveying that sentiment is important to Force of Nature’s founder, Clover Hogan, who was a teenager when she started the group in 2019, just before the pandemic made everything virtual. One of her catchphrases is “We don’t need 100 perfect activists but millions of imperfect ones.”
The informal group sessions for Becoming a Force of Nature, free on Zoom, are the initiative’s main offering. The group has also built an interactive site called Hold This Space , which leads individuals through similar mental pathways. And it’s created a podcast that includes digitally solicited #climateconfessions: “I’ve stopped going to protests.” “I drive everywhere.” “I just can’t be arsed to separate or put out the recycling.”
The group has also moved away from its strict eco-focus. “We still think it’s really important, but it’s not our bread and butter at Force of Nature anymore,” Hooper says. Now it’s beginning to use less climate-specific language in its outreach and encouraging people who come to its events to talk about other sources of anxiety or existential despair—cost of living, conflict, whatever.
They made the shift, Hooper says, for two reasons. For one, young people in privileged countries may be anxious, but others are in survival mode—responding to acute crises, not just philosophical ones. For another, talking exclusively about climate grabs only a certain kind of person, and Force of Nature doesn’t want to exist in an echo chamber—especially when its leaders recognize that there’s plenty else to worry about.
Force of Nature had around 900 participants in Becoming a Force of Nature last year and has about 2,000 students from more than 50 countries in its online community. It may be the most prominent receptacle for young people’s planetary feelings, but it has company. Another group, called the Good Grief Network (GGN), recently spun off a program for teens. Its facilitators are trained online, but the youth programs typically take place in person.
GGN, a Michigan-based nonprofit, has a 10-step program for adults, modeled after the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step model, to help people deal with their worldly anxieties.
Susan Igras, a program designer and evaluator, took part in the adult GGN program and found it helpful. She wanted to adapt it for kids. “So we designed something that was much more experiential—action-, reflection-based,” she says. Igras and a collaborator cut the number of steps down to five, built the program around interactive activities, and called it GGN-Z.
Igras and a collaborator began testing it in 2022 with kids in Northern California. The program is still small, but she’s hopeful it can match the success of the adult version, which has been run more than 85 times with around 2,500 total participants. The group is beginning online training so that club leaders and teachers around the world can use the strategies in their home regions.
It’s early days, but some of GGN-Z’s activities are already resonating. One perpetual favorite is the “bad news graffiti wall,” in which kids scrawl the things causing them angst onto a big sheet of paper. (On one recent wall, kids drew “Meta=cringe,” “hate speech,” a tornado, “LA” with a fire above it, and a dollar sign with an up arrow.) As a group, they then talk about the feelings those bad things bring up.
Kids also tend to like GGN-Z’s storytelling activity. “Like a ‘Once upon a time, I became aware of climate change,’” Igras says. It asks kids to reach back into their memories, to their first awareness that humans had altered the planet. One recent participant wrote, “Scared, 2nd grade learning about non-renewable resources.” Another wrote of seeing a picture of a skinny polar bear on a small chunk of ice.
Participants then switch to the positive, drawing their support web—a map of everyone who cares about them and the places and people that make them feel supported. That positivity leads them into thinking about what they can do and who can help them.
Does it all work? GGN-Z is currently in the process of evaluating itself—something Igras thinks is not done often enough for interventions in this area. “Where’s the program research? Because everyone is talking about feelings, but how do you know what works?” she says. “We’re trying to build the evidence.” She and her colleagues are conducting surveys to see whether participants report improved well-being and have more skills to manage emotions.
Force of Nature is also trying to quantify its impact, and to that end it has joined a 25-organization project called Youth Mental Wellbeing. For five years, they’ll study the collective work of these organizations. “The goal of the project is basically just to spotlight what’s working, to really show proven methods of working with young people and supporting them on their mental-health journeys,” says Hooper.
The idea of taking a scientific look at these kinds of interventions is just beginning to bloom. But if the people running the programs actually want to help kids, it’s important to find out which methods work—and avoid spending a lot of time on things that will leave them feeling the same or worse.
Most existing research on effectiveness, though, simply shows that such research is new. Jachens, for instance, coauthored a 2021 scoping review of eco-anxiety programs for people of any age, to understand the nature and extent of existing research. She found 34 in existence. Of those, only two had done any formal evaluation on themselves. “We need to know what works for who, when, and where,” Jachens says. In fact, she pleads with developers: “Please evaluate what you build.”
Another scoping review from 2024, led by Siqi Xue of the University of Toronto, found that the research gap hadn’t closed. The team included the Good Grief Network in its analysis, noting that while GGN said 90% of participants in its programs felt more empowered and less alone, it didn’t publish any data or methods backing up that finding.
Still, these analyses do have bright spots. They suggest that the group approach provides connection and validation—as well as an active direction for youths’ troubled feelings. “When people feel genuinely heard and held in their distress, they tend to move quite naturally toward wanting to do something,” says Jachens.
Few studies have looked at programs tailored to kids and young adults. But an analysis of one program in Sweden, called the Climate Emotion School, has at least added early dots of color to the map. Its curriculum was shaped by the work of Panu Pihkala, an interdisciplinary scholar in eco-emotions research based at the University of Helsinki. He outlined a “coping model” that emphasizes how important it is for people, including kids, to express emotions, learn how to regulate them, take action based on them, and form meaning from them—all while practicing self-care and taking healthy distance from big feelings when necessary.
“When people feel genuinely heard and held in their distress, they tend to move quite naturally toward wanting to do something.”
In the study, Britta Eklöf, a clinical psychologist based in Sweden, found that students in the climate program were relieved to share their bad feelings and see them mirrored by others, something that wasn’t generally happening in their interactions with adults. Grownups didn’t want to dwell on negative emotions with them, and their parents tended to try to soothe them. “The recommendation instead is to validate and share,” Eklöf says. And then, of course, give them something they can do.
Implementing the rest of the coping model—“finding meaning and hope in a hopeless situation,” as Eklöf puts it—can be harder for students and teachers. To do that, she says, kids have to admit that they can’t control the future and consider what they personally want to cultivate—not necessarily to fix the whole planet, but to make their immediate world a better place. For example, they might take out their neighbors’ recycling when it’s raining or join a local beach-cleanup effort.
“These days it feels like the good values of humanity are being shredded,” Eklöf says. “But you can say, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen, or if this will have a positive influence or not, but this is what I stand for.’”
The world doesn’t appear to be chilling out anytime soon, literally or philosophically. And so it’s good that programs like Force of Nature and GGN-Z are digging into the effectiveness of their techniques: We might need more of them soon, and more ways for young people to find their footing no matter how the polycrisis (d)evolves.
Sullivan-Tailyour, who recently graduated from King’s College London and now leads in-person “climate cafes” with Force of Nature (among other eco-jobs), has been thinking more about how problems in the environment are bound up with those in the social, economic, and political realms. “The intersectionalities that we have in this issue are so much more than just plastic bottles,” she says.
Those other issues are, in fact, tangled up in her climate worry these days. “We’re seeing the deterioration of democracy itself in many places. The shift to the far right that we’re having at the moment across the world is deeply, deeply terrifying,” she says. “I think we’ve reached moments in our history that we never expected to.” She tries, though, to look for the hopeful things—and for that, she also turns to history.
After all, the world has always been bad in myriad ways: Children used to die frequently, everyone died of now-preventable diseases, women didn’t have rights, slavery proliferated, the bubonic plague killed half of Europe, fascism spread, wars went worldwide. And yet people kept on living their lives—and attempting to make them better.
Eklöf thinks looking to the resilience and power of people from the past can actually build and bolster hope for the future. Just as humans can change the planet for the worse, they can change it for the better. And they have. “That’s actually one of my recommendations, to have that in an intervention: Talk about Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, the suffragettes,” Eklöf says.
It can help, she says, to “look at things in the past where things have been made right again.” That’s even happened in the climate space: When humans realized that the ozone layer was withering away from the effects of synthetic chemicals, the vast majority of countries ratified a treaty to ban most of those chemicals. And the ozone started healing.
Sullivan-Tailyour, a few countries away from Eklöf, has come to that idea on her own. And for inspiration, lately, she’s been thinking about her ancestors and the lives they led. “If they [were] able to go through it and get through it,” she says, “we also should be able to get through it too.”
Sarah Scoles is a freelance journalist based in Colorado. Her most recent book is Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons .
