Climate Anxiety Now a Thing. Scientists Have Felt it for Years

That diffuse feeling of unspecific global dread?
It’s got a name.

New York Times:

Europe is a continent on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

In Greece, nerves are shot as weeks of blazes raging out of controlhave given way to flooding that has submerged villages, washed away cars and left dead bodies floating in the streets. Italians are frazzled as a summer of incinerating heat waves lingers and fear mounts over the return of hailstones the size of handballs.

A group of young Portuguese, exhausted by sweltering temperatures and spreading fires, are suing European nations for causing the climate change that they claim has damaged their mental health, much as their counterparts in Montana sued the state.

And, in a common refrain of the eco-anxiety era, it gets worse.

The same storm that hit Greece gained strength over the Mediterranean and pummeled Libya with flooding that killed thousands.

A recent United Nations report delivered the bad news that the world was way off track in meeting it pledges under the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Polls have registered a deepening malaise. The specter of burning in nuclear fires started by the war in Ukraine has moved to the back burner.

In an era of ever-increasing anxiety, now is the summer — and autumn — of our disquiet, and eco-anxiety, a catchall term to describe all-encompassing environmental concerns, is having its moment.

While it is not clinically recognized as a pathology, or included in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, experts say the feeling of gloom and doom prompted by all of the inescapable images of planetary gloom and doom is becoming more widespread.

“Climate change is moving faster than psychiatry for sure and also psychology,” said Dr. Paolo Cianconi, a member of the ecology psychiatry and mental health division of the World Psychiatry Association, who is publishing a book with colleagues on the topic this month. He said that the term eco-anxiety had existed for more than a decade, but that it was “circulating very much” these days, and that the condition would only increase in the future.

“When people start to be worried about the planet, they don’t know that they have eco-anxiety,” he said. “When they see this thing has a name, then they understand what to call it.”

Within Europe, “back to back” crises have left Greeks particularly vulnerable to mental health problems, said Christos Liapis, a prominent Greek psychiatrist. He said it was not just the fires and the flooding. The 2010 financial crisis, the 2015 migrant crisis, Covid, inflation and energy crises took their toll, too, “and finally the climate crisis, which hit Greece particularly hard,” he said.

“Constant stress has a deeper impact on mental health than acute short-lived stress,” Mr. Liapis said. “The person who’s already struggling due to higher rent will be harder hit when his home floods.”

On Thursday, the Greek Health Ministry said it would put in place a “comprehensive program of interventions for psychosocial support” for victims of the floods and send mobile units of mental health professionals to the afflicted areas.

A few days after the Italian environmental minister got choked up, the newspaper la Repubblica commissioned a survey about the toll that the apocalyptic weather was having on Italians. “Not only the young suffer from eco-anxiety,” the paper declared, with the poll finding that 72 percent of Italians were pessimistic for the future and convinced that the environmental situation would deteriorate in the coming years.