Topic: Climate Change Depression

originally posted Sept 2016; most recently updated January July 2019. Dec 2020


F*ck That: An Honest Meditation

Some fruits of meditation. Ian Welsh.

2020 addition:

Hiding in Plain Sight. Jonathan Foley. Dec. 5, 2020.

[Dr. Jonathan Foley is a renowned climate scientist, sustainability expert, educator, and public speaker. He is also executive director of Project Drawdown — the world’s leading resource for climate solutions. His work focuses on finding solutions to sustain the climate, ecosystems, and natural resources we all depend on.

Foley’s work has led him to become a trusted advisor to governments, foundations, non-profits, and business leaders around the world. He and his colleagues have made major contributions to our understanding of climate change, ecosystems, and the sustainability of the world’s resources. He has published over 130 peer-reviewed scientific articles, including many highly cited works in Nature and Science. He is among the top 1 percent most-cited scientists in the world.]

I’ve been dealing with depression my entire life. It’s been a miserable experience, and it’s taken years to learn how to manage it. But one thing that helped was learning that many people I admire are struggling with depression too. So, despite the risk of going public, I’m going to share my experience, in hopes that it might help someone else.

... In the public sphere, I have been deeply moved by Dr. Susanna Harris, a brilliant young biologist and science communicator who shared her story. I was blown away by Dr. Santa Ono, the President of the University of British Columbia, who now openly discusses his history with mental illness. I am also deeply moved by the books of Matt Haig, who makes depression relatable, and the work of radio personality and author, John Moe.

Articles:

The Best Medicine for My Climate Grief. Peter Kalmus, Yes!Magazine. Aug. 9, 2018.

A climate scientist talks to a psychologist about coping with the crushing stress related to climate change. Here’s what he learned.

... To think daily about climate change and any of its dire implications can be a crushing psychological burden. Each of us is just one mammal, with all our mammalian limitations—we get tired, sad, irritated, sick, overwhelmed—and the climate crisis wields the force of 8 billion humans with infrastructure, corporations, capital, politics, and imaginations heavily invested in burning fossil fuel.

“It’s important to remember that inaction is rarely about a lack of concern or care, but is so much more complex,” Lertzman said. “Namely, that we westerners are living in a society that is still deeply entrenched in the very practices we now know are damaging and destructive. This creates a very specific kind of situation—what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. Unless we know how to work with this dissonance, we will continue to come up against resistance, inaction, and reactivity.” 

I’ve been working through my own climate dissonance since 2006, back when the atmospheric carbon concentration was just 380 parts per million. That year I reached a tipping point in my own awareness of what was happening and what it meant. It was challenging to carry that knowledge when no one close to me seemed to care. But, said Lertzman, “we need to be careful not to make assumptions about other people’s relationships with these issues. Even if people may not be showing it, research shows again and again that it’s still on their minds and a source of discomfort or distress.” If she’s right, maybe the sea change in public action we desperately need is closer than it seems. It would certainly be helpful if we could talk openly about how climate change is making us feel.

It’s the End of the World as They Know It. The distinct burden of being a climate scientist. David Corn, Mother Jones. July 8, 2019.

So what is it like to be cursed with foreknowledge that others ignore? Peter Kalmus, who received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard and Columbia, respectively, spent about a decade working in astrophysics. He then moved to ecological forecasting based on satellite data, and something shifted for him. “Studying earth science and thinking about climate change is a totally different ballgame than thinking about astrophysics,” he says. “Astrophysics was pure science. I was looking for gravitational waves. It had no implication for the possible collapse of human civilization.” But the unrelenting momentum of climate change does. “I’m always thinking about it,” he says. “That can be a burden. Whenever friends talk about flying off to vacation, I feel compelled to point out the large carbon cost to flying. I’d like to take a vacation from thinking about it. I’m not sure that is psychologically possible.”

... 

Sarah Myhre, a former senior research associate at the University of Washington’s School of Oceanography, experiences “a profound level of grief on a daily basis because of the scale of the crisis that is coming, and I feel I’m doing all I can but it’s not enough,” she says. “I don’t have clinical depression. I have anxiety exacerbated by the constant background of doom and gloom of science

... 

Jacquelyn Gill, a paleontologist at the University of Maine who co-hosts a podcast on climate change called Warm Regards, says she’s “not depressed but angry, all the time, and anger can be empowering or debilitating. I swing between both. Being constantly angry is exhausting.” But, she adds, it takes a certain resilience to be a scientist in America: “There are so few jobs, so few grants. You’re always dealing with rejection. You have to have a built-in ability to say ‘fuck it.’”

... 

Katharine Wilkinson, who has a Ph.D. in geography and the environment, is vice president for communication and engagement at Project Drawdown, a group of scientists and activists that assembles proposed climate change solutions. She makes a distinction between denialism and bystanderism, which takes the form of people saying “they care about it” but not engaging in meaningful action: “That’s when I want to shake people and say, ‘You know how little time we have?’” She has noticed that almost everyone in her line of work seems “to have one dark emotion that is dominant. For some, it’s anger or rage. For me, it’s deep grief—having eyes wide open to what is playing out in our world, and we have a lukewarm response to it. There is no way for me not to have a broken heart most days.” 

For several years, Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist-turned journalist, has written about his own efforts to contend with climate change–induced depression. “I lose sleep over climate change almost every single night,” he wrote last year. “I can’t remember how long this has been happening, but it’s been quite a while, and it’s only getting worse.

... 

Michael Mann, the well-known climate scientist who has spent years clashing with climate deniers, observes that “colleagues who have convinced themselves we have crossed a tipping point—physical or political—and we won’t avert catastrophic climate change clearly become depressed.”

Uncovering the Mental Health Crisis of Climate Change: How to move people from apathy to action. Jeremy Deaton, Nexus Media. July 7, 2018.

The Threat Of Climate Change Brings Both Anxiety & Apathy.

The young man believed he only had five years to live. “Not because he was sick,” said Kate Schapira, “not because anything was wrong with him, but because he believed that life on Earth would be impossible for humans.”

The sign on Schapira’s booth read: CLIMATE ANXIETY COUNSELING 5¢ THE DOCTOR IS IN. Time to earn her pennies.

On that muggy June day, she had set up shop in Kennedy Plaza in downtown Providence, Rhode Island. Schapira is not a trained therapist — a fact she makes clear to visitors — but she is happy to chat with anyone suffering from anxiety about climate change. “A lot of what I do is listen and ask questions,” she said.

Over the coming decades, rising temperatures will fuel natural disasters that are more deadly than any seen in human history, destabilizing nations and sending millions to their death. Experts say that we need to prepare for a hotter, less hospitable world by building sea walls, erecting desalination plants and engineering crops that can withstand punishing heat and drought, but few have considered the defenses we need to erect in our minds. Some, like Shapira, have called for more talking, more counseling to process our grief. But will that be enough? Climate change will do untold violence to life on this planet, and we have remarkably few tools to deal with its emotional cost.

... 

The tall, sharply dressed man said humans were a cancer on the Earth. He said that he resented his parents for raising him to be “super hedonistic, just monstrously gaining things.” He said he had grown nihilistic, that he wanted to take up chain smoking and die a slow death. When Schapira asked if he was angry at his family, the young man replied, “I love my family. It’s so hard to know that you only have five years left to love people.” 

The man was undoubtedly troubled, his vision of the future decidedly more apocalyptic than the one offered by science. But, his anxieties were real and, perhaps, understandable given the dire predictions of climatologists. While none believes human civilization will crumble in the next five years, the forecasts get hazier 30, 40 or 50 years down the road. 

If we continue pumping out heat-trapping carbon pollution at the current rate, temperatures will rise by 4 degrees C by 2100, a level of warming climate scientist Kevin Anderson has called “incompatible with an organized global community.” As David Wallace-Wells explained in his bracing account of the terrors of climate change for New York magazine, “Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.” 

Climate change promises to take a massive toll, not just on nature or human society, but on our minds.

... 

Lertzman explained that to grasp the full implications of climate change is daunting — to recognize our part in it all the more so. To fire up a car or step onto an airplane is to defile the very air we breathe. People cope by disavowing their role in climate change. “You’re not denying something, but you are choosing not to know,” Lertzman said. “There rarely is genuine apathy,” she added. “What shows up as apathy is a defense mechanism. It’s a way for people to cope with the very complicated feelings that come up around these issues.” 

Like Lertzman, other mental health professionals have warned of the mental and emotional impact of climate change. Psychiatrist Lise Van Susteren coined the term “pre-traumatic stress disorder” to describe the pervasive dread felt by many scientists, advocates and journalists. In the years ahead, she said, the problem will only grow more widespread. 

... 

Climate depression is for real. Just ask a scientist. Madeleine Thomas, Grist. Oct. 28, 2014.

“I don’t know of a single scientist that’s not having an emotional reaction to what is being lost,” Parmesan is quoted saying in the National Wildlife Federation’s 2012 report, “The Psychological Effects of Global Warming on the United States: And Why the U.S. Mental Health Care System is Not Adequately Prepared.” 

“It’s gotten to be so depressing that I’m not sure I’m going to go back to this particular site again,” she says, referring to an ocean reef she has studied since 2002, “because I just know I’m going to see more and more of it dead, and bleached, and covered with brown algae.” 

Lise Van Susteren, a forensic psychiatrist based in Washington, D.C. — and co-author of the National Wildlife Federation’s report — calls this emotional reaction “pre-traumatic stress disorder,” a term she coined to describe the mental anguish that results from preparing for the worst, before it actually happens. 

“It’s an intense preoccupation with thoughts we cannot get out of our minds,” Van Susteren says.

The psychological effects of global warming on the United States. And why the U.S. mental healthcare system is not adequately prepared. National Wildlife Federation. Feb. 2012.


A talking cure for climate-based depression? It worked for Renee Lertzman. Heather Smith, Grist. Feb. 18, 2016.


Climate change is wreaking havoc on our mental health, experts say. Tyler Hamilton, The Star. Feb. 28, 2016.


It’s Time to Talk About Ecological Grief. Michaela Cavanagh, UnDark. Jan. 10, 2019. 

As climate change marches forward, it will exact a mounting, tangible toll on our collective mental health and productivity.

What Mary Oliver can teach us about dealing with climate grief. Eric Holthaus, grist. Jan. 22, 2019.


Dancing with Ulysses. Albert Bates. Feb. 9, 2019.


Reports:

Beyond Storms and Droughts: The Psychological Impacts of Climate Change. American Psychological Association.

Psychology and global climate change. APA.

Hope, despair and transformation: Climate change and the promotion of mental health and wellbeing.  Jessica Fritze et al, International Journal of Mental Health Systems. June 2008.

Sites:

Active Hope. How to face the mess we're in without going crazy.

Psychologists for social responsibility. Program on climate change, sustainability and psychology.

Transformational resilience. The Resource Innovation Group.

Ecological Buddhism. A Buddhist response to global warming.


Videos:

Joanna Macy and the Great Turning.

Mental Health and Climate Change. TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin. via youtube. Dec. 4, 2018.

Burnout and Despair: Studying the Climate. The Agenda. Jan. 15, 2019.


Conferences:

ITRC Conference To Highlight How Building Build Human Resilience for Climate Change Can Increase Wellbeing & Cut Emissions!
Nov 3-4, 2016. Washington, DC.