Nature Connectedness, Belonging and Social Identity in a Group-Based Ecotherapy Programme

This chapter recounts the findings of a unique collaboration between researchers at the University of Brighton and the Grow Project, a charitable organization providing free and low-cost nature-based interventions for groups of people who have experienced depression, anxiety and stress. The collaboration involved teaming up a research psychologist and psychotherapist from the University with coordinators, volunteers, former and current participants in an intervention. The main purpose of the collaboration was to delve into the organization’s own evaluations spanning multiple years, with the aim of understanding how participants made sense of their involvement in the Grow Project, especially their mental health and well-being. We worked towards this aim by collating and thematizing the preliminary evidence already generated by those involved in Grow, devising a set of research questions with the project’s co-coordinators by carrying out some additional targeted qualitative research and by contextualizing the findings in existing literature. Finally, we considered the implications of our results for mental health practitioners, policy makers and other decision-makers. In what follows we first outline literature addressing the relationship between mental health and natural settings before providing an overview of our approach, findings and discussion.