#eco anxiety
‘I was enjoying a life that was ruining the world’: can therapy treat climate anxiety?
There is a danger, in suggesting that therapy might help, of pathologising climate anxiety; turning it into a mental health problem that needs to be cured – medicated or spirited away with mindfulness or talking therapy . Many people I interviewed were faced with such reactions from friends, family, colleagues, GPs, and, occasionally, even therapists.
This is not how the author of Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis Sally Weintrobe thinks. “It is important to say that anxiety is a signal that there is something wrong. It’s a perfectly normal healthy reaction to a worrying situation. We mustn’t pathologise climate anxiety. Obviously it can get very extreme – but I would say that government inaction on the climate crisis is pretty extreme, so it’s hardly surprising that people are very worried.” What Knapp, James and Perrin said helped them most was having their emotions validated in therapy – and understanding that their feelings were meaningful and valuable.
Caroline Hickman, a psychotherapist, climate psychology researcher and board member of the Climate Psychology Alliance, says, “I would worry about people who aren’t distressed – given that this is what is happening, how come?” She believes that people are using psychological defences such as denial “as a way of coping and reducing the fear that they feel”. This can leave the climate-anxious with a sense of isolation, frustration and abandonment, as others tell themselves, “Oh, well, the government will save us; technology will save us; if it was that bad, somebody would have done something,” she says. “Those are all rationalisations against existential terror of annihilation – and that’s the reality of what we’re potentially looking at.”
To face this reality is to come out of what Weintrobe calls “the climate bubble”, which, she says, “has been supported by a culture of uncare, a culture that actively seeks to keep us in a state of denial about the severity of the climate crisis”. She explains: “The bubble protects you from reality, and when you start seeing the reality, it’s hardly surprising that you’re going to experience a whole series of shocks.” She prefers the term climate trauma over anxiety because “it is traumatising to see that you are caught up in a way of living, whether you like it or not, that makes you a victim and a perpetrator of damaging the Earth, which is what keeps us all alive”. We are living, she says, “in a political system that generates a mental health crisis, because it places burdens on people that are too much to bear, as well as burdens on the Earth”.
The thing about trauma is that it can reignite earlier, individual trauma. That experience of coming out of the climate bubble and having your worries dismissed, of realising that you have been abandoned by people who were supposed to look after you, can be particularly triggering. For Weintrobe, this is where therapy can have a role to play, “in helping people to disentangle what is personal to them and their own individual histories, from what is hitting them from the outside”.
It is perhaps surprising to hear Weintrobe – a psychoanalyst – say that while there is a role for therapy in addressing climate anxiety, it is limited. We need to normalise this distress, she says, but not by pretending it’s not there, or shouldn’t be. “It’s very perverse that normalising has come to mean getting rid of anything that’s disturbing. Can we make it normal that we are very disturbed and bothered by what is going on, and help each other?” She recommends meeting to talk in groups about climate anxiety, such as at the climate cafes run by the Climate Psychology Alliance. Hickman runs psycho-educational groups with youth activists to address the impact of the climate crisis on mental health, where they discuss ways to support themselves and each other.
