Topic:  Ecotherapy – health, wellbeing and resilience – Martin Jordan

Resources: You can download Martin’s slides.

Session Summary: Ecotherapy can be located in a broad movement that has been growing over the past decades. This movement seeks to enlist the context and processes of the natural world in order to promote physical and psychological wellbeing, as well as recovery from physical and mental ill health. This session will explore some of the underpinning ideas informing ecotherapy such as ecopsychology and greencare. It will also look at the relationship between mental health and planetary health and the role that ecotherapy might play in supporting resilience, especially in the face of environmental degradation and resource depletion.

Biography: Martin Jordan is a chartered counselling psychologist, UKCP registered psychotherapist and counsellor. He is also a senior lecturer in counselling and psychotherapy and course leader for the post graduate diploma in psychodynamic counselling at the University of Brighton. After completing a first degree in psychology, Martin went on to train as a drama-therapist, and became interested in working with stories and myths. He subsequently engaged in further training in counselling psychology and psychodynamic psychotherapy. He has worked in mental health settings both in day centres and residential treatment. He set up and managed a therapeutic service for drug using offenders and worked with families experiencing drug problems. He is publishing a book on ecotherapy called ‘Nature and Therapy’ with Routledge.

Who might be most interested: Academics, practitioners, researchers, students, parents, carers, community workers, volunteers, public sector workers, young people and service users.

Key Reading:  Buzzell, L., Chalquist, C. (2009) Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind. Sierra Club Books
Centre for Ecotherapy
‘Ecotherapy’ works – Mind

This session took place on Wednesday 17 September 2014.

The Resilience Forum is for ANYBODY (with a pulse!) involved with or interested in resilience research!

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