âUnder the Weather: As Psychiatrists And Philosophers Begin To Define A Pervasive Mental Health Crisis Triggered By Climate Change, They Ask Who Is Really Sick: The Individual Or Society?â, 2019-12-02 (; similar)â :
Eating fallen fruit and sleeping outside, however, didnât provide him relief from his feelings of guilt and foreboding. He began to feel a dread that was inescapable and all-consuming. A devastating depression that he had suffered a few years before that fall semester returned. Normally a math phenom, Chris started failing his tests. In his apartment, he would sit in the darkâhe didnât want to waste electricityâlisten to records, and cry. âI felt like I was slowly dyingâ, he said. A few months later, Chris left Davis to pursue a PhD in philosophy at the University of Kansas. But his condition didnât improve. After having subsisted on scavenged persimmons and radishes for the entire fall term, heâd lost a dangerous amount of weight. His mother paid a visit to campus and, horrified by his appearance, immediately drove him to the grocery store to buy food. At home, Chrisâs family had a hard time understanding the intensity of the self-denial that governed his life. His father and sister blamed his breakdown on abuse that Chris had suffered as a child; they believed his desire to escape society was a projection, an act of taking responsibility for something that wasnât his fault. But Chris had a different explanation. When he was fifteen, his father had taken him and his sister on a trip to Mount St. Helens. Halfway up the mountain, they had passed clear-cut land. As Chris recalls, one moment there was only evergreen forest and the next moment there was nothingâjust bare ground and stumps as far as he could see. A word came to his mind: evilâŚâThey made it sound like I had a psychosis or a mental breakdown and that this is just the form it took, when really, shouldnât anyone who is ethical and compassionate also choose to opt out of this society?â
âŚI was working fifty-hour weeks, mostly unpaid. My mother, concerned, suggested that I take a break. But I refused. There was no pause button on climate change, so why should I get a break? On some days, Salt Lake City, where I lived, had exceptionally bad air quality, a thick soup of pollution settling between the mountains and the valley. The corridor between Salt Lake and Provo, where Iâd gone to college, had been completely converted from farmland to strip malls in just ten years. To the south lay one of the biggest open-pit copper mines in the world, to the north was an industrial warren of refineries, and to the west was nuclear waste buried in clay-sealed chambers, reeking of death. That was just the local stuff. Coral reefs were collapsing, ocean ecosystems were overfished, and people in island nations were trapped between salted well water and the swallowing sea. Meanwhile, everyone around me was fineâŚSometimes I could do it. Other times I got combative, desperate, contrary. Meanwhile, Chris got married and had two children. When we hung out, he was happier. But he was different too. In his purist days, heâd let his lawn go to seed, refusing to use scarce water resources to keep it green. Now he was living in the suburbs, putting in Kentucky bluegrass. âWhy donât you just keep your lawn the way it was?â I said, too urgently. âBecause Iâve been sad my whole lifeâ, Chris said, âand sometimes I just want to sit on my green lawn with my wife and feel love.â I knew it was just a lawn, but it upset me anyway.
âŚI quit climate activism for a time, but Iâve kept going to therapy, and I keep confusing my therapists by talking about the end of the world. As it turns out, Iâm not alone. A report released in 2012 by the National Wildlife Federation warned that climate change is creating a mental health crisis. The climate scientists, psychologists, and policy experts who authored the study estimated that two hundred million Americans will suffer from mental illness as a result of natural disasters, droughts, heat waves, and economic downturn. Recent disasters bear this out. In the wake of Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricoâs worst natural disaster on record, there was a 7% spike in PTSD among the children who survived. In the year after Hurricane Katrina, the suicide rate in New Orleans tripled, and the number of instances of depression and PTSD grew to what health experts described as near-epidemic levels. Even people who arenât directly impacted by climate disasters can be affected. According to a 2017 report by the American Psychological Association, merely acknowledging the reality of climate change and its consequences can trigger chronic fear, fatalism, anger, and exhaustionâa condition that psychologists are increasingly referring to as eco-anxiety. Eco-anxiety can manifest in other serious ways. In 2008, in the midst of a severe drought in Australia, a seventeen-year-old boy refused to drink water because he was afraid that doing so would lead to the deaths of millions of people. Doctors diagnosed him with âclimate delusionâ and prescribed antidepressants. When they asked him why he took such drastic action, he said he felt guiltyâŚGreta Thunberg, a sixteen-year-old Swedish girl who inspired the growing student climate strike movement, says that learning about climate changeâand seeing adultsâ inactionâcontributed to a severe depression during which she stopped eating and drinkingâŚother activists are turning the violence of climate change on themselvesâlike David Buckel, a human rights lawyer who in 2018 lit himself on fire in Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, to call attention to the scale of the climate plightâŚQuante told me that one of her earliest memories was learning that so many things around her were aliveâthe trees, the grass, the frogs. It terrified her to realize the harm she was capable of. One day, after it had rained, her mother made her walk along a worm-strewn sidewalk, and she screamed as she was dragged along. âWeâre killing them!â she said. âWeâre killing them!ââŚVan Susteren started having trouble sleeping. After getting into bed and closing her eyes, she would be ambushed by intrusive images. She would see refugees surrounded by barbed wire, animals trapped in the path of a hurricane, people stranded in floodwaters. The worst image was of a child. It wasnât any child she knew, but a sort of representative for all children. The child looked at Van Susteren and asked the same question again and again: âWhy didnât you do anything?â As a psychiatrist, Van Susteren recognized her symptoms. The stress, the insomnia, the intrusive thoughtsâthey read like PTSD. And yet the trauma she was imagining hadnât happened yet, or at least it hadnât happened to herâŚVan Susteren coined a new term for her condition: pre-traumatic stress disorderâŚIn the back of the class, a student started crying. âIf I didnât have hope, how could I live?â she asked.
âŚRobert Salo, the doctor who diagnosed the Australian boy with climate psychosis, was careful to note the boyâs other symptoms (long-term depression, suicidal thoughts, and hearing voices) and the disproportionate sense of importance he placed on his own actions (believing that his own small water usage would lead to widespread deaths). Other critics have pointed out that climate delusion usually afflicts people who already suffer from other mental health maladies, and that the triggers for psychotic episodes generally take the form of the dominant political or cultural issues of the time, from nuclear holocaust to Cold War-era fears about the spread of communism.