Climate Inaction: an assault on the mental health of our kids

Originally published in The Sudbury Star on Oct. 16, 2021

“If you are a Baby Boomer . . . do you remember how frightened you were about being nuked? . . . Remember how they scared the hell out of us? . . . Now they’ve transferred that to global warming, except it isn’t real.”  That’s Rush Limbaugh on his radio show in 2014. The “they” he’s referring to presumably includes climate scientists, climate activists, and any politician who proposes actual climate action. Apparently, it’s all fearmongering. It’s upsetting people and causing mental health problems. Of course, Rush dismissed the dangers of smoking too, and now he’s dead of lung cancer. Perhaps a bit more anxiety would have done him some good.

In some circles, it’s fashionable to blame the climate angst of young people like Greta Thunberg on environmental education and the constant deluge of dire warnings about imminent climate catastrophe, destruction of ecosystems, and extinction of species. There’s no doubt our children and youth are anxious. Many of them are angry, too. However, in the face of the very real environmental threats we face, feelings of alarm, anxiety, and anger seem like appropriate responses, not signs of mental illness. In fact, as one young adult commented in a 2013 study, “My worries are rational, climate change is not.”

Derogatory terms like “mass neurosis” and “global warming hysteria” are propagated by people like Rush, who don’t “believe” in climate science (or apparently tobacco science either.) The rest of us know there’s a serious problem, and yeah we’re worried about it. Many of us are even alarmed. And when that worry is united with a sense of agency and focused on problem solving and solutions, it can be a highly constructive feeling, leading us to engage with the issue and take action. Research suggests that taking action in the company of like-minded people can be one of the best strategies for dealing with climate anxiety.

The situation is particularly perilous for the mental health of our youth. They are not just little adults. They are still growing and developing. And if adults feel unsure about how to change what’s happening to the planet, imagine how disempowered young people must feel. They can’t even vote. They are stuck with relying on adults and governments to respond, on their behalf, with an appropriate level of science-based action, which we have manifestly failed to do. Is it any wonder young people feel abandoned and betrayed? That their climate angst has the colour of anger? The flavour of moral injury?

In 2009, Litz and colleagues suggested that potentially morally injurious events might arise from “perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.” On a day-to-day basis, children and youth are learning about and bearing witness to the ongoing destruction of the planet by adults who are perpetrating, or failing to prevent, the wreckage. We risk inflicting what Shay described in 2014 as a “character wound that stems from a betrayal of justice by [persons] of authority in a high stakes situation.” It’s worth pondering what might be the long-term impact of such a wound on today’s young people, if we adults keep failing to tackle the multiple environmental crises we’ve created.

Perhaps that’s why parents worry that soon enough, young people we love will ask us what we did to prevent climate change or mass extinctions. Will we have answers, or will their questions overwhelm us with guilt and shame?

People like Rush Limbaugh would have us protect kids from climate anxiety by stopping the “fear mongering”. I say the better way to protect our kids from anxiety, anger, and moral injury is to act. Young people need to see adults, the businesses and corporations they’ve created, and the governments they’ve elected, stepping up to the plate, and making the needed action happen. This decade. This year. Next month at COP26 in Glasgow.

Sources:

https://live-rush-limbaugh.pantheonsite.io/daily/2014/05/06/podesta_helps_obama_play_dictator/

VerPlanken B and Roy D (2013). “My worries are rational; climate change is not”: Habitual ecological worrying is an adaptive response. PLoS ONE 8(9): e74708. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0074708

Lancet Preprint: Hickman C et al (2021). Young people’s voices on climate anxiety, government betrayal and moral injury: a global phenomenon. Electronic copy available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3918955

Litz B et al (2009). Moral injury and moral repair in war veterans: a preliminary model and intervention strategy. Clin. Psych. Review 29:695-706. DOI: 10.1016/j.cpr.2009.07.003

Shay J (2009). Moral injury. Psychoanalytic Psychology 31:182-191. https://doi.org/10.1080/00377310903130332 

Griffin B et al (2019). Moral injury: an integrative review. J Trauma Stress. 32(3):350-362.https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.22362   

Clayton S (2020). Climate anxiety: Psychological responses to climate change. J Anxiety Dis 74:102263.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2020.102263