Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice.

Welcome to the Mad in America podcast. I'm Akansha Vaswani, and I am a fifth-year doctoral student at UMass Boston.

And today I'm going to be speaking with Jennifer Freeman, who is a marriage and family therapist

and also an expressive arts therapist.

She has been engaged in therapeutic conversations, in the national community work, teaching, and professional

writing for the past 30 years

based on narrative approaches. But today, actually, she's going to speak to us about some of her

thinking and research on responses to climate change. And we're very happy to have her here today.

Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, Jenny. Thank you, Akanchah. I'm delighted to be here and thank you so much for

taking this on and for your interest and concern on this. So to begin with, you know, I'm wondering,

why were you particularly concerned about this area of climate change?

Can you tell us a little bit about your personal history and how it got you to explore this topic?

So why was I particularly concerned about this?

Well, I would say our roots as therapists or healers don't start with our training in graduate schools or programs.

I trace this interest back to my family's 75-year-old adoptive relationship with the kinship

groups in a beautiful Samaran village called Saanapu in the island of Upolu.

I carry a title to this day from there Afenga Itinoti.

I was incredibly fortunate to come of age,

living within this extended family,

and we were immersed in a beautiful,

what I would call, eco-sourced life. We bathed in

springs, we lit oil lamps at night, we walked everywhere, we fished on a healthy reef,

...