Mental health and climate change

I was reviewing student work on climate change a few weeks ago and realized that it was taking a toll on my mental health. The activity in question, asks students to create, take, or find an image that conveys something about climate change. I’ve had this activity in my course for a number of semesters and it is based off of the research I did for my PhD. As a result, I’ve been able to, anecdotally, notice some trends over time. This semester, more than any other, saw students sharing personal images of devastation from extreme weather and disasters. The wildfires in Alberta, where I live and teach, in 2023 were unsurprisingly top of mind. Of course, fires from BC and earlier in Alberta also featured. I also saw images of extreme flooding from people’s home villages in other countries. While there were some images of polar bears, a large number of the images were deeply personal and reflected how climate change is more commonly seen as something that people have direct experience with.

If the images, and teaching sustainability in general, is taking a toll on my mental health, it is more than likely that students are experiencing this as well. Unfortunately, this is hard to avoid. As a result, I’m trying to look more into the research about mental health and climate change. My hope is that I can find some strategies to move myself and the students from despair to action and hope.

Patrick and colleagues (2023) examined the mental health impacts of climate change in Australia. Their findings were that most Australians say they have had direct experience with a climate change-related event and one in four of those people met the screening criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. People without direct experience, especially youth and women, are showing symptoms of pre-trauma. Eco-anxiety also featured prominently, with youth and people from disadvantaged regions showing higher rates.

In a review of the literature, Boluda-Verdú and colleagues (2022) found that eco-anxiety, which they describe as “people’s emotional reaction of concern, worry, anxiety, and fear in view of global Climate Change (CC) threats and concurrent environmental degradation” (p. 1), needs to be better defined but is associated with consequences like functional impairment, lower self-rated mental health, and symptoms of depressing, anxiety, PTSD, and stress. They also found that women, younger generations, and those from poorer countries tended to show higher rates of eco-anxiety and associated negative mental health outcomes. They did find that engaging in pro-environmental behaviour can provide a buffer. But this isn’t a guarantee, as individuals do not always associate their actions with actually helping to mitigate climate change.

This isn’t great news. We already see higher rates of mental health concerns and as the impacts of climate change hit more frequently and closer to home, mental health impacts will likely continue to grow. A third article by Crandon and colleagues (2022) therefore caught my eye. In this article they look at clinical implications. How do health workers respond to this growing threat? As I’m not a medical professional, I’m going to shy away from the discussion of implications for medication use and focus on some of the other recommendations.

Improving resilience – psychological resilience is “the ability to overcome and recover from difficult stressors” (p. 1477). This could include interventions to reframe thoughts so that things like catastrophizing and uncontrollable worry are reduced. Or to develop and enhance useful behaviours including activities that contribute to climate mitigation or other projects.

Planning and services – this includes education for health professionals but also community actions like improving community preparedness and planning and response to disasters like wildfires, floods, and heat waves.

Workforce capacity and training – is the acknowledgement that there will be an overall increase in need for medical professionals and professionals with appropriate training. As well, there will be predictable higher levels of need during extreme events.

Advocacy and education – there are opportunities and a clear need for more advocacy for climate action and research into the health effects of climate change. As well, mental health professionals can provide guidance on developmentally appropriate education to support both climate action and resilience.

While these recommendations are focused on mental health practice, I plan on thinking about how I might be able to use them to make some adjustments in my courses. I don’t want students leaving at the end of the semester with despair. I want everyone to see that they all have a role to play and they have the ability to identify what that role is and how they will achieve it.