Amplifying Anxieties: Climate Disruption’s Effects on Mental Health
“Imagine if your house is burned down, blown away, or flooded … You lose the community that you used to live in … and you’ve now lost the support of the familiar setting that you were once in. Ask yourself, how would a person feel? And now you’ve got, in a nutshell, the mental health impacts of climate disruption.” This is the analogy Dr. Lise Van Susteren, psychiatrist, educator, and climate activist, offers to explain the intuitive — but in her eyes, overlooked — relationship between climate change and declines in global mental wellbeing.
Van Susteren, co-founder of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance and Climate Psychology Alliance North America and former member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at the Harvard School of Public Health, argues that the serious threat of worsening mental health, among other reasons, demands we take immediate action on climate change.
She has been promoting awareness of this issue on talk shows, and through a joint project targeting state legislatures. The plan is to enlist mental health professionals and faith leaders in calling attention to the emotional toll of climate disruption on children and young people, with the hopes of convincing states to form task forces to assess their own risks and resources. Within her field, Van Susteren has called for mental health practitioners to develop subspecialties in climate and mental health and helped put together a directory of climate-aware therapists. She and her colleagues have created an online resource for the public to learn more (an “EcoCyclopedia”), and hosted events for folks to discuss their anxieties around climate disruption.
In 2009, when she first broached the subject by holding a psychiatry conference in partnership with the National Wildlife Federation, she knew of no other psychologists making the same connection. Yet, she feels it came naturally. “We [psychologists] understand science, and we certainly, theoretically at least, know how to highlight the empathy that is necessary to recognize that a lot of people are being hurt,” she says. The conference, which was attended by national experts in psychology, environmental science, and policy, became the basis for her 2011 NWF report titled “The Psychological Effects of Global Warming on the United States And Why the U.S. Mental Health Care System Is Not Adequately Prepared.”
Some of Van Susteren’s skeptics have criticized her inability to quantify this predicted increase in mental illness, or even to clearly attribute it to climate disruption. More recent research, however, supports her claim — the effects of climate change are associated with symptoms of depression, posttraumatic stress, and other psychiatric disorders. And even if it’s impossible to break down one’s anxiety by percentage, as Van Susteren explains with a laugh, we can be sure of one thing: that “each anxiety amplifies the other.”
“We really don’t need fancy studies,” she adds. “All we really need is common sense.” And as the climate has become more volatile, Van Susteren has garnered more support for her ideas from the public. “We don’t have to listen to people talking about it or read about it. We’re living it,” she says.
Van Susteren feels acutely that our time is running out. “Once we get much higher than we are right now, in terms of temperature rise, it’s no longer humans who are exerting the force on planetary climate systems,” she says. “It’s the planetary climate systems that take over.” Despite this sense of foreboding, the climate-aware psychiatrist, who no longer travels freely due to the carbon emissions of flying, believes that there is still hope for people to take meaningful action. She suggests actions including reforestation and regenerative agriculture practices.
Ultimately, Van Susteren believes the potential to end climate change is in each of our hands — and must be. “We will certainly hope the federal government does what it should, but we can’t count on it,” she says. “We now have to consider local action, and that includes state and neighborhood by neighborhood.”
— Staff writer Ciana J. King can be reached at ciana.king@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @cianajoleen.