Let's all go mental

A few days ago, several thousand people gathered in Hamburg, Germany, to protest fossil fuels and specifically natural gas, calling for a more sustainable future.

"In general there's the idea that Europe needs LNG to stay warm in the winter and this is really a lie," Canada’s CBC quoted an activist as saying at one point during the week-long protest.

The young activist went on to add, per the report, that the construction of more LNG import terminals — something the German government sees as essential for securing enough energy for its population — would be "a crime against climate and against people."

You can blame it on bad education. You can blame it on the girl’s parents or the news she has not doubt been consuming in great quantities on social media. Or you can blame it on climate anxiety.

A paper was recently brought to my attention that discusses the possible causes of climate anxiety and treatments as well as, quite shockingly to me, whether it should be treated at all. After reading the paper, which basically reviews other research, I was left with the distinct feeling that unlike ordinary anxiety, climate anxiety needs to be maintained, in its less severe forms.

This is where a lot of the hope I’d previously had about humankind managing to avoid a complete social disaster died a sudden death. You see, like many others, I used to believe that psychology, like psychiatry, does not just exist to produce papers but to help people with very real, unpleasant and not infrequently tragic health problems.

I also used to want to be a therapist once I outgrew the temporary insanity that led me to apply for the Sanskrit programme at SOAS. I’m glad I didn’t go down that road because I’m not sure I would’ve been able to bear the pressure of so much human suffering. Trauma is a real thing, even if modern youth culture has abused the concept.

Back to the climate anxiety paper, I was somewhat surprised to learn that there was such a thing as ecopsychology even though knowing how easily psychology lends itself to spinoffs I should not have been surprised at all.

I wouldn’t want to burden you with quotes about the definition of ecopsychology so let’s just say it amounts to the argument that we have severed our connection with nature and now we’re suffering the consequences, which appear to include climate apathy and feelings of impending doom because of the destruction we’ve wrought on the biosphere.

Guilt appears to be a very big thing in climate anxiety as well. It is this guilt, it seems, that ecopsychologists seem to suggest needs to be nurtured to maintain awareness of climate change and spur us into action.

Here’s a quote the author of the paper has included, by another researcher, which quote, to me, is exceptionally cynical:

“…if ecoanxiety is treated as pathology, ‘the forces of denial will have won…what we are witnessing isn't a tsunami of mental illness, but a long-overdue outbreak of sanity”.

Normally, I wouldn’t try to interpret someone’s arguments from a single sentence if I’m not familiar with more of their work but the very start of this sentence rang my alarm bells: “if ecoanxiety is treated as pathology”. And here I thought all anxiety was pathological and I certainly know a lot of the scenarios my brain likes to write in the small hours of the night are not within the norm.

Luckily for me, my form of anxiety is quite manageable and tends to only lead to mild annoyance for my family when I start calling them frantically because they did not call me the second they arrived in the city so obviously I thought they’d become roadkill.

I am not trying to make light of a grave problem. Anxiety can be as debilitating as clinical depression. It can lead to tragic consequences. So, to suggest that some forms of anxiety, if they’re not totally debilitating, can be actually a positive by getting more people to do what those protesters in Germany were doing is at best stupid and at worst qualifying the author for a face-down fall on a hedgehog.

Yet this author is only a drop in what looks like a sea of climate psychologists, all of whom assume the direct existential threat of climate change is a fact and therefore in their research call scepticism a form of denial. And this, my friends, is a very dangerous thing.

Calling someone a climate denialist, in addition to nonsensical, is normally an attempt to offend someone for thinking differently than you. Saying from the pedestal of academia that millions of people are in denial of something immediately labels them as suffering a psychological condition, or, to put it politically incorrectly, being not normal.

What makes all this even worse is that, as most of us know, the above means that psychologists are accepting as fact something, on which there is no consensus. I repeat: there is no consensus and I can finally link the proof: this declaration by 1,107 scientists, engineers, and even psychologists that there is no climate emergency.

I’ve stood away from the whole “Is there an emergency or not” debate because I’m not a scholar and I lack the knowledge to contribute to this debate in any way. What I can and will do is challenge the dominant narrative in energy and this is what I’m doing by linking to this declaration.

I’m sure many have already dismissed that statement as the product of people who are paid by the oil industry or the nuclear industry or are just plain stupid and stubborn, and refuse to accept facts. The Western world has become a place where there is one truth only and it must not be challenged, regardless of whether it’s in the domain of science, which was built on challenging assumptions. What ironic times we live in.

But let’s go back to those LNG terminal protesters. I’m sure ecopsychologists will like them all very much. They clearly exhibit symptoms of anxiety (if you’re spending a week in a tent to oppose something, you are definitely not okay with that something) but it’s the right kind and the right level of anxiety because the sufferers are taking appropriate action (spending a week in a tent to oppose something, i.e. LNG import terminals). And this action is, ultimately, quantifiable.

One might naively think that the quantification of action taken as a result of suffering anxiety should ideally be the reduction of that anxiety. Last week I first called my daughter, she didn’t pick up, my anxiety spiked, I called my husband and he told me they were alive and shopping for dinner, and she’d forgotten her phone in the car. Anxiety gone, quantifiably, through things like heart rate and absence of a hot feeling.

This, apparently, is not the effect sought by ecopsychologists. I apologise for the long quote but it’s necessary.

“Adams asserts that treating climate anxiety needs to address the underlying dangers. and therefore requires meaningful collective responses, including ‘acknowledging loss collectively and publicly’ as ‘an important step in facing up to the reality of the Anthropocene and the impossibility of carrying on “as normal”’.

Randall has emphasised the importance of experiencing and articulating difficult emotions, such as loss, grief and fear, in a shared context as a way of developing forms of mutual support.

In addition to dealing with anxiety in their clinical practice, therapists can help support the development of social containers to express, contain and mobilise climate anxiety into positive social change. Ultimately, the results need to be measured in reduced carbon dioxide emissions rather than necessarily reduced expressions of fear.”

Well, there you have it. A certain group of people with access to peer-reviewed journals and social media believe that first, we cannot go on living as we have lived for the past however many years, second, that experiencing feelings of loss, grief, and fear is good for us, and third, that climate anxiety can be used to fight climate change.

If someone on Twitter says something along the lines of “They want you to stay afraid” most would dismiss it as conspiracy theory and even less than that because it’s just an accusation, not a theory.

If scholars tell you that it’s good for you to be afraid because it leads to productive action that will change all our lives for the better, it’s an entirely different statement. Fear is an expression of our self-preservation instinct — this, I think it’s safe to say, is a fact. As such, fear can save lives. It can, and often does, cost lives, as well, because fear is commonly incompatible with rational thought and decision-making.

Yet seeking to deliberately maintain a continual feeling of fear in as many people as possible is something else. Because while in certain situations fear can save lives, chronic fear, like chronic stress, is anything but life-saving. There’s a massive body of research on just how dangerous it could be.

And yet there appear to be a number of people — the authors cited in that paper above — who sound like they are ready to celebrate children having nightmares about the end of the world because of climate change because these nightmares can be used to lower emissions. Even if it costs the children their mental health.

What this means is that a number of people have prioritised emission reduction over health. Let’s take a moment to let that sink in.