SPOTLIGHT

The ECOMIND Certificate is Australia’s first Climate Mental Health program equipping the next generation of climate leaders with the skills to look after themselves, each other and the planet, sustainably. The program was co-designed with young people and built through months of research and consultations with young people, mental health researchers, and peer organisations working on climate distress around the world.

This is what we learnt:
1. Climate action burnout was described as an internalised sense of over-responsibility: the belief that if they didn't do everything, nothing would get done. This was compounded by grind culture, perfectionism, and a lack of models for what sustainable activism actually looks like.
2. Rest is not a luxury, it's resistance. Several experts pointed to the connection between the extractive, always-on culture driving the climate crisis and the extractive culture inside the movement trying to solve it. Learning to rest was described, repeatedly, as a radical act.Isolation makes everything harder.
3. Young people told us that the antidote to climate anxiety wasn't more information, it was connection: peer support, mentors, and community that could hold the weight collectively instead of individually.
4. Emotions need somewhere to go. Grief, anger, and helplessness were named again and again, alongside a clear ask: don't pathologise these feelings, give us tools to move through them and back into action. Young people wanted practical tools, not therapy speak.

These insights, alongside a structured co-design process with our Youth Advisory Board, resulted in the Certificate's three modules: Looking After Yourself, Looking After Others, and Looking After the Planet.