Mark Broussard and Dix Moore-Broussard sat on opposite ends of a semicircle with a group of students from Loyola University, leading them through a series of exercises on a Sunday afternoon in Audubon Park.
It was a warm day, and the group sat quietly with their eyes closed and noticed what they sensed in their surroundings – the smell of grass and mud, distant chattering, cars driving by and a DJ playing loud music at Audubon Zoo.
Then, Mark asked the group to go around the park and dialogue with its natural features for 15 minutes and then talk about their experiences. One participant lingered next to a weepy tree nearby. Another went over to a tree stump and found it was stuffed with trash, which they said made them sad.
While debriefing, Mark said that interacting with nature can help participants regulate their nervous system, but that humans have complex, sometimes challenging, relationships with nature, too.
“Anyone who’s been in nature knows it’s not always rainbows and unicorns,” he said. “Nature can have a wrath. Nature can be unforgiving.”
Louisiana residents are all too familiar with nature’s wrath. The state has been one of the most impacted by massive ecological disasters over the last 40 years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Nearly every year, catastrophic weather events like Hurricanes Katrina and Ida cause compounding trauma and anxiety for people throughout the state.
That has all taken a toll — not only physically and financially, but psychologically. Therapists and social workers in New Orleans say the effects of climate change have exacerbated a mental health crisis in the city.
Mark and Dix, who are married psychotherapists, are part of a growing number of mental health professionals around the country who are helping people with the grief, trauma and anxiety caused by the effects of climate change. There are now hundreds of so-called professional “eco-therapists,” listed in directories maintained by the Climate Psychiatry Alliance and Climate Psychology Alliance North America, who offer services like psychotherapy, art therapy and medication management specifically to help with climate-related mental health issues.
There are only three Louisiana therapists listed in those directories — Dix among them — though there are professionals in the state who have experience working with people with climate-related mental health issues. “The reason why we’re all coming together as trauma specialists and focusing on climate change is because we want to do prevention,” she said, so other places that experience the effects of climate change don’t have a mental health crisis “like [what’s] happening in New Orleans right now.”
Mark has worked as a wilderness counselor and is currently the clinical manager at Metropolitan Crisis Response Team. Dix has worked with youth in New Orleans schools and in the juvenile court system.
They started The Neutral Ground Collective in 2019 out of their home. They offer what they call a “decolonized psychological approach,” to mental health issues for underserved communities throughout the state. Moore-Broussard said that means being mindful of the ways white supremacy affects people’s lives, dismantling white supremacy and focusing more on communal experiences than individual experiences.
Mark is the Neutral Ground Collective’s clinical director and Dix is the director of expressive art therapies for the nonprofit. Both of them have heritage that runs deep in Louisiana – Mark is Cajun and Dix is Creole and indigenous to Louisiana.
Together, they offer mental health services through one-on-one and group sessions, helping people work through trauma caused by climate change and anxiety about how it will affect the planet in the future, among other climate-related issues.
“We want to focus on providing services for people who are experiencing stress and trauma,” Mark said. “We noticed, being in the field, that there’s a dearth of services offered. So we just wanted to…provide quality services, and be part of the healing process.”
The Neutral Ground Collective offers free group therapy sessions throughout the city – on college campuses, in parks and at Live Oak Yoga on Magazine Street. The sessions consist of mindfulness exercises, doing scans of the body to notice what sensations and feelings are arising, connecting with nature, yoga and art therapy. During the sessions, Dix educates participants on stimulating the vagus nerves – a large group of nerves that control digestion, heart rate and immune system – through movement, in order to help regulate challenging emotions.
“When you’re starting to feel like it’s collapsing into like anxiety or anger – move,” she said during a recent session.
Dix said what makes them different from other therapists is they are trained to help people who have mental health issues caused by climate change or environmental degradation and they do so from a neurobiological point of view, by helping people regulate their nervous system.
For example, she began working with three men from Lafitte and Cut Off who lost their homes in Hurricane Ida. “They were so distraught,” she said. After teaching them tools to help them regulate their nervous system and identify how their bodies were reacting to environmental stressors, the men were able to better cope with the destruction wrought by Ida.
“They were able to find that safe space where life was a little bit more manageable,” she said.
Recently, Kathleen M. Benedetto, a climatologist who studied at Louisiana State University and Tulane, joined The Neutral Ground Collective to infuse the group’s services with scientific information about climate change. With the addition of Benedetto, the organization hopes to develop a curriculum to teach people how climate change affects the psyche and how to work through those effects using their current methods and narrative therapy. Narrative therapy will provide space for people to “process their story from a shared community experience,” Moore-Broussard said.
There’s already a lot to process because of the effects of climate change, and there’s more to come. Climate change has already adversely affected the mental health of people around the world, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Mark and Dix want to be there to help people pick up the pieces left by climate change and prepare for the future.
“It’s gonna be interesting, because we don’t have enough trauma specialists in the city at all,” Dix said. “And we’re gonna see hotter and hotter times. I don’t feel like New Orleans is going to be sustainable for many different populations.”
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