Guardian ‘You’re browsing in a supermarket and fretting mildly about the air miles of some green beans. Or you’re daydreaming of that island holiday you deserve once the pandemic has died down but worrying about whether you should be flying. How about the amount of meat you eat and all that plastic it’s wrapped in? Maybe you should be vegan. Maybe you shouldn’t have children: they will only increase your carbon footprint. Maybe nothing you do will matter anyway.
They call it climate anxiety – a sense of dread, gloom and almost paralysing helplessness that is rising as we come to terms with the greatest existential challenge of our generation, or any generation.
Now an increasing number of psychologists believe the trauma that is a consequence of climate breakdown is also one of the biggest obstacles in the struggle to take action against rising greenhouse gas emissions. There is a growing sense that this trauma needs a therapeutic response to help people beyond paralysis and into action.
A deep sense of dread and vertiginous anxiety may be the most rational response to the dizzying pace of the climate breakdown in 2020, but it is seldom the most helpful when it comes to affecting change on the scale needed to limit the unfolding crisis.
Caroline Hickman, a psychology lecturer at the University of Bath, says climate trauma has been lurking within western society’s collective psyche for the last 40 years, rendering most people unable to act on the looming crisis we have known for decades would come.
“As that trauma is coming to the surface today we see this as anxiety,” she says.
Those left standing in a supermarket unsure whether they should buy an avocado may be suffering from mild eco-anxiety, according to Hickman. “You’re not falling apart but you feel caught in a dilemma.”
Hickman is part of the Climate Psychology Alliance, a coalition of psychologists working to help individuals and organisations address climate anxiety. The group is part of a growing chorus of voices advocating the use of psychological principles to help process the collective trauma of environmental breakdown and motivate action.’
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