Donate
Over the last few decades depression and anxiety have spread like wildfire in the western world. More and more people sense that something is wrong, without being able to name it. The fear and despair that some individuals experience in response to the ecological, social and cultural threats we are facing has been given a label. Eco-anxiety is the new buzzword that makes the rounds amongst climate-aware mental health professionals. The American Psychological Association references eco-anxiety as a likely effect climate change may have on our mental health. We could say that eco-anxiety is heightened psychological (mental/emotional/somatic) distress in response to the climate emergency. Symptoms can manifest as trauma reactions, depression, anxiety, aggression, irritability, insomnia, panic attacks, obsessive thinking, and others.
And it is in the terminology that the problem begins. Whilst clinical terms can communicate complex dynamics and map out the psychological terrain, the use of clinical language can reduce human emotions into a pathology that needs to be eradicated in the same way we wrestle unwanted plants to the ground with the use of weedkillers. Clinical language invites a clinical response, and opens the door for things to be measured, analysed and predicted, so that treatment, prevention and control can be worked out. Legitimate anxiety in the face of danger is then treated as an individual malfunction that needs to be fixed, which is in line with our heroic culture, its individualistic outlook, and the dominance of dualistic thinking.
There is a whole industry of self-help books and quick-fix therapy interventions devoted to eliminating unwanted feelings. We seem to have been socialised out of our capacity to bear the unbearable and to allow our hearts to break wide open. Pharmaceutical companies provide us with the means to sedate our pain, bringing us back into a sleepy state of mild discontent. Some forms of therapy and alternative health appear to aim for a similar appeasement. Even mindfulness practices are often decontextualised and used to disperse the discomfort that calls to us from a far-distant-seeming depth.
But what if these symptoms are the last lifeline we have to re-ensouling our lives and our world? In that light it may be the state of denial, the numbing to the crisis, that deserves our clinical attention. The dysfunction does not lie in feeling fear: it lies in the absence of adequate worry and mobilisation in the face of danger. It lies in a widely shared epidemic of malignant normality and toxic silence that are supported by collective amnesia and anaesthesia. We forget and numb ourselves on mass scale. By the time the reality is undeniable, we may well have a mental health crisis at global scale on our hands.
The climate emergency is extremely scary to contemplate, and anxiety is an inevitable consequence of facing the facts. Fear is a healthy emotion and only becomes problematic if the conditions needed for individuals to be heard and supported are absent. Distress in the light of climate change is therefore an entirely appropriate response. It requires a mature culture capable of facing fear and taking decisive action, rather than an individualised and introspective approach.
We have known about the risks of climate change for over 50 years. The scientific community assumed that we are purely logical creatures who will adjust our trajectory if we have clear information in front of us. No attention was paid to the irrational, chaotic, emotional responses of human nature, which meant that our capacity for denial, corruption and deflection has not been taken into account. The failure to acknowledge the complexity of the human psyche is no longer sustainable. Climate change breaks down the artificial boundaries between us and the world, between the personal and the public, between science and our fallible human response to it. The effects of climate change impact on our mental health, and in turn our psychological ‘response-ability’ over the next few years will alter the state of the world, one way or another. It is time we widened the lens.
Psychologically we tend to dissociate when we feel unable to deal with the enormity of the challenges we are facing. Through a process of disavowal and compartmentalisation, we are able to rationally engage with climate change facts while continuing with business as usual. Our cognitive knowledge is kept separate from our felt response, so that there is no urgency to mobilise. The more reality is systematically avoided, the more anxiety builds up unconsciously and the need for further distortion increases. Whilst this process maintains our emotional equilibrium, it costs us the Earth. When this defence breaks down, anger and aggression may erupt to restore the status quo, or the result may be anxiety and grief. Anxiety can therefore be a sign that there is enough emotional strength to allow a rigid deflection to dissolve.
Rather than attempting to rid people of this anxiety, we can support individuals and communities to build strong containers that allow the exploration of the full spectrum of emotions, without collapsing under it or turning away. Within this window of tolerance, we can engage with difficult truths while staying connected.
There are many acts of rebellion, and one of them may be to invite each other into heartbreak. Grief is the primary way in which the heart softens and remembers what we have sacrificed. Grief is suffused with life force and has a distinctively subversive quality, “undermining our society’s quiet agreement that we will behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small,” wrote psychotherapist Francis Weller. If we allow the grief underneath our anxiety to touch us, we can bring the exiled parts of our humanity back home and become more intimate with the state of the world along the way. This invitation into heartbreak is not because there is pleasure in suffering, but because on the other side of it lies a bigger and fuller connection with the world.
