Anxiety and the Ecological Crisis: An Analysis of Eco-anxiety and Climate Anxiety

Posted by PP on December 1, 2020 at 12:18pm

Pihkala, Panu (2020). Anxiety and the Ecological Crisis: An Analysis of Eco-anxiety and Climate Anxiety. Sustainability 12 (19), 7836. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12197836

My new article discusses the many possible forms of “eco-anxiety” and “climate anxiety”, and makes the case that eco-anxiety should not be seen as a mental health issue.

DK - December 1, 2020 at 6:45pm

If “mental health issues” are understood as the medicalized (because generally unwanted) states of mind that a particular society can no longer cope with in terms of its norms, the “climate crisis” presents an especially challenging problem because its own definition, scope, and even its denial are not part of anything close to a global or even national consensus. Just within this paper, it's unclear if “climate crisis” means an increasingly probable near-term mass extinction, civilizational collapse, or whether it's a cipher that could mean potentially all of those things to some people. This definitional crisis — the lack of consensus and conflicts around them — is itself a part of the crisis and may be its greatest source of mental anguish. I wonder if this is perhaps a clue as to how the whole can be understood and dealt with analytically, as an acute crisis of meaning that cannot be resolved from within the paradigms of the collapsing system, like academic psychology.

While recent coinages like “Eco-Anxiety” and “Climate Grief” pose real definitional problems too and make for very dubious diagnostic terms, “Anxiety” in general is something that comes up again and again to define the character of many eras within western history, and this can be instructive to us in our individual struggles if we come at it with a wider, more sociological lens. “Anxiety” and related terms go back to the Stoics and some Socratic precursors where it arises from a terrifying agnoia (ignorance, not knowing) related to the direction and purpose of one's society and existence itself under the disruptive pressures of invasion, political collapse, etc. Scholars examining this historical phenomenon, especially within the context of the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century (e.g., Arendt), have often described a signature psychological crisis of meaning that seems relevant again on several levels. So, considering the climate crisis through the lens of political history and sociology might be helpful. In those fields “alienation” figures prominently as a (problematic) diagnostic concept that is current again. I have been concerned over its history of use in “victim blaming” where anxiety, depression, loneliness, or breakdown are deemed personal defects and even a feature/bug of certain personalities or ideologies. There are also those who say these conditions or experiences must sometimes be suffered to survive, grow, and even flourish. The breakdown becomes a breakthrough.

AM - December 24, 2020 at 3:30pm

Thanks for the nice disection and exposition of the topic.

My perspective is that I am part of a team that specializes in environmental and climate issues in conflict and disaster affected states. This team is embedded in a part of the UN with a mandate to monitor and publish updates on the state of the global environmnent and climate. As such, we are saturated daily with negative trending data, analyses and case studies and most of the team is sharp enough to see where the evidence points to in the medium to long term.

Unsurprisingly, this has generates a broad array of emotional responses and coping strategies. Recently, we have now directly confronted this issue and personally I am exploring options for mitigation.

The first positive components of a solution link to your paper. I found that stepping back from the core topics of concern (ecosystem collapse data, cimate scenarios etc..) allowed me to see that there is absolutely nothing new or unique in the team situation, in psychological terms. The external environment is new, but our reactions, responses and strategies would be completely familar to professionals working with healthy and balanced (or somethimes otherwise) individuals and team in extreme and difficult settings. On this basis, the very well proven methods of basic support (well-being activities, peer support, psychological self help etc..) at present appear to be starting to work well.