Many people today are ‘worried’ about the climate emergency and nature crisis. For some, this means devoting their life to campaigning for climate action. For others, it means debilitating anxiety and stress.
But how do we think about this? Is this a ‘condition’ needing some form of treatment – as some are suggesting it should be technically identified – or an entirely natural, expected reaction to the circumstances of our society? Is it not pathological to identify an individual problem when we actually have enormous shared ones?
These were questions that I had the chance to discuss last week with a powerful all-day international conference run by Drop the Disorder, a group campaigning for a new professional approach to mental health, one that acknowledges distress of individuals in response to the many traumas our society throws at its members rather than labelling individuals with particular categories of illness.
Reframing the way we perceive our reality
One suggestion on the climate issue is to drop the term ‘eco-anxiety’ and instead speak of the positive response of ‘eco-empathy’ – a healthy recognition of the reality in which we now live. There’s reason to look at it that way on public health grounds, but also in terms of policy, with evidence that being concerned about the climate emergency leads to pro-environmental behaviour and also hope.
We might wonder also about the reverse reaction to the current state of the world; what illness infects the oil company bosses, and politicians, who plough on, heating up the planet for the profit of the few, when they – and their children – are going to have to live with the consequences? That really is disordered thinking.
A natural response to tragic events
It is something to which I bring personal experience, and conclusions drawn more than 30 years ago. I was then in a car crash in which my mother, to whom I was extremely close, was killed. In the weeks and months afterwards, I had panic attacks, I occasionally suffered attacks of rage unreasonably directed at my then-partner. I found going to sleep difficult; I could control my thoughts in the waking hours, but in those moments between sleeping and waking, memories of the crash and its aftermath would intrude unmanageably.
I was in one way lucky. My Australian 1970s and 1980s upbringing gave me little framework to manage this experience; a ‘stiff upper lip’ and not talking about emotions was the dominant explanation of ‘how to cope’ with anything. But as a young journalist, I’d had cause to write a number of stories about grief, including covering a really pioneering event in the small country town in which I was based organised by the local mothers’ group that focused on the emotional impacts of miscarriage and stillbirth.
So I knew about the label post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and could easily – and clinically correctly – identify my reactions as reflecting it. But I chose, consciously, not to regard myself as ‘ill’. I said at the time that had I been massively punched in the stomach, I’d have bodily responses, and what I was experiencing was a natural response to the tragedy. It worked for me and has continued to frame my thinking about mental distress since then.
Empowering individuals and communities
As a society, we are, slowly, starting to recognise the social determinants of ‘mental illness’. ACEs – adverse childhood experiences – are acknowledged increasingly widely as a major factor in later life struggles for many. Understanding of the need for schools, prisons, and all services, to be ‘trauma-informed’ is slowly spreading.
Yet less clearly understood is that all of our young people have suffered over their entire lifetimes. The Covid pandemic has been traumatic, of course, but there’s also a very broad loss our societies are encountering; older people today grew up with a confidence that the world was generally getting better, that they had a good shot at personal and collective security (at least in many parts of the world). The young don’t have, cannot have, that same certainty. As the Association of Clinical Psychologists said in 2021:
“The ultimate answers lie not in new mental health treatments or an expansion of existing services, but in collective responses to collective distress because of the climate and ecological emergency.”
That surely means empowering individuals and communities to take action. In work on the now probably dead Energy Bill, I was working with Community Energy England on an amendment to empower groups to power up renewables in the local area. Solar panels on the church hall or a community wind farm on the hill might not be thought of as mental health provision, but the evidence is – by allowing individuals to take control of their own destiny – they may well be.
Decolonising distress
But it also means allowing space for grief, creating rituals and frames in which to acknowledge the distress as reasonable and expected. I can remember thinking in the middle of my mother’s funeral – the first funeral I had ever been to – that our society was very bad at creating rituals and patterns to support people like myself at that time.
At last week’s event we were pointed to a powerful poem from Sanah Ahsan, Decolonising Distress, which shows one way of emotionally engaging with our current realities. We have lost security and certainty. We have lost natural ecosystems and species, with many more on the edge of extinction. Communities are struggling with past and continuing colonialism.
For a healthier society we need to create rituals and ceremonies, memorials and formal records, to acknowledge our losses, the damage we’ve done. They can also, crucially, act as a reminder too of the urgent need to change our ways.
