Climate anxiety is real: global warming hitting the mental health of many, therapists call it a ‘different beast’
- Experts report rise in clients who say climate change is having a profound effect on mental well-being; studies suggest it is increasingly widespread
- Psychologist says anxiety about the environment isn’t a disorder, as it’s an understandable response to a real and rational danger’
Climate change is hurting the mental health of many people across the world. Photo: Shutterstock When psychotherapist Caroline Hickman was asked to help a child overcome a fear of dogs, she introduced them to her Labradoodle, Murphy.
“You get the child to feel confident in relation to the dog and teach the child skills to manage a dog,” she says. “You build the skills, build the competence, build the confidence, and then they’re less scared of dogs generally.”
Climate anxiety is a different beast, Hickman says. “We don’t 100 per cent know how to deal with it. And it would be a huge mistake to try and treat it like other anxieties that we are very familiar with that have been around for decades. This one is much, much worse.”
In the most critical cases, climate anxiety disrupts the ability to function day to day. Children and young people in this category feel alienation from friends and family, distress when thinking about the future and intrusive thoughts about who will survive, according to Hickman’s research. Patients obsessively check for extreme weather, read climate change studies and pursue radical activism. Some, devastatingly, consider suicide as the only solution.
And Hickman isn’t the only expert seeing this. In her book A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, Sarah Ray describes a student who had such severe “self-loathing eco-guilt” that she stopped consuming much at all, including food.
Most people’s concern about global warming isn’t that pronounced. It can be difficult to pin down exactly what climate anxiety is, and therefore what to do about it. Especially for adults, there’s still a stigma in admitting that it’s severely affecting your life.
But therapists report they are grappling with a rise in demand from clients who say climate change is having a profound effect on their mental health, and studies suggest the angst is increasingly widespread. Existing professional methods for dealing with anxiety aren’t always suitable in these situations. For the counselling community, the situation calls for a new playbook.
In 2021, a study of 10,000 children and young people in 10 countries, co-authored by Hickman and published in The Lancet Planetary Health, found that 59 per cent were very or extremely worried about climate change and more than 45 per cent said it had a negative effect on their daily life.
US schools hope to fight climate change through ‘Green New Deal’
A survey of mental health professionals in the UK, published last year in The Journal of Climate Change and Health, found that they perceived “significantly more” patients describing climate change as a factor in their mental health or emotional distress, an increase the participants expected to continue. Frustratingly, climate anxiety can also overlap existing mental health problems, making it difficult to analyse in isolation.
So what are therapists actually doing in their treatment rooms? The first point is they’re not making any diagnoses, as anxiety about climate change isn’t a disorder.
“We consider it much more as an understandable response to a real and rational danger,” says Patrick Kennedy-Williams, a clinical psychologist based in Oxford, UK.
Working with someone who has social anxiety or a phobia is partly about “recalibrating their sense of risk and threats,” he says – realigning the fear with the actual threat level. That isn’t usually the case with climate change, he says, because “the threat is real.”
Greenpeace says ‘recycling is a myth for clothing’
Also, there’s no “classic case” of climate or eco-anxiety. Some patients may need to discuss direct experience with climate impacts, such as a flood or wildfire destroying a home, while others might, for example, want to talk about their guilt at watching others suffering, or struggles with friends or family who are dismissive or hostile. People might not even say they’re feeling “anxiety,” he says, instead using words like trauma, grief and depression.
“It doesn’t fit neatly into our way of thinking about mental health,” Kennedy-Williams says, “probably because the climate crisis and our relationship with the climate crisis is a lot more multifaceted than that.”
Climate anxiety often ends up being linked to many other dilemmas in the normal course of a person’s life, including big choices like whether or not to have children, where to live or what to do for work. Many of these questions are already highly stressful and emotional. The problem of whether or not to have children, in particular, is one around which Kennedy-Williams has seen “huge amounts of distress” in the therapy room, he says.
Some anxieties are linked to specific triggers, which can be directly addressed and resolved. But climate change is more wide-ranging. Global warming is also not resolvable by any one person, so it’s impossible to gain a sense of confidence and control over the problem.
“You can’t personally resolve it,” says Hickman. “You can go off and do your recycling, and become an activist, or do X, Y, Z, but it’s a global problem. It’s not personal.” Many patients also feel that those in power are asleep at the wheel, adding to a sense that no one is in control, she says.
Perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of anxiety over climate change: it can also be linked to climate denial. Experts said the two can be understood as different manifestations of the same feeling. “The conspiracy theorists are reassuring,” says Hickman. “If you can’t tolerate anxiety, you will then spin off into believing somebody who gives you false promises.”
If you have suicidal thoughts or know someone who is experiencing them, help is available. In Hong Kong, you can dial 18111 for the government-run Mental Health Support Hotline. You can also call +852 2896 0000 for The Samaritans or +852 2382 0000 for Suicide Prevention Services. In the US, call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org for the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. For a list of other nations’ helplines, see this page.