Climate Change Anxiety Disorder: On the street or in my head?

Late last summer I had a nightmare whereby climate change ruined my life. Apparently, climate change stresses me out and this was my brain’s way of sounding the alarm. It went something like this:

I was house hunting. In overpriced housing bubbly Vancouver.  And finally, of all miracles I found the perfect property. It was part of a fictional neighbourhood that was truly up and coming. There, I found an empty beachfront lot. It was cheap and I was elated. That is until I realized that within the next fifty years my perfect happy home would be ever so slightly submerged by rising sea levels. This dampened my future floorboards and hopes. I woke up crestfallen and blue.

Gore help me, my climate change anxiety was large enough to take root in my subconscious and sprout in my dreams. But the real question was whether my nightmare was a symptom of a greater collective anxiety in our society.

So I coined my affliction “Climate Change Anxiety Disorder” and began to research whether there was any evidence to legitimize my newly minted malady.

There is very little doubt that climate change itself will trigger numerous mental maladies. Climate-related natural disasters displace families, screw over their homes, and can have long lasting effects on their levels of anxiety and depression.

As a case in point, the incidence of mental illness doubled in the survivors of Hurricane Katrina in the months following the disaster. Meanwhile Australia is currently experiencing the worst drought it’s suffered in over a millennium and rural farmers are taxed. The mental health organization Beyond Blue found that a drought-stricken Australian farmer commits suicide every four days, twice that of the national average. On the other end of the spectrum, flood victims were similarly distraught in 1997 during the Red River flood.

By 2080 some 4.5 million UK citizens will face a serious risk of flooding. The International Futures Forum’s report on the relationship between climate change and mental health forecasts that the mental health of these citizens will be weighed down by the flooding events themselves, together with the economic stress of insurance withdrawals and difficulty selling houses. So yes, climate change spells mental gloom.

But my real question was whether the anticipation of its effects alone could tax our psyches.

“I don’t have nightmares, but I do lash out at people,” says Jason, who runs a VoIP phone company in Vancouver. He admitted to assuming the worst was in store (“everything will go to hell”). Hence his reaction to those that waste resources: “If a hummer goes by I want to blow it up.”

But others are finding the psychological green landscape a bit more zen. “I don’t hear as much “the sky is falling” stuff as I used to,” says Trevor, a web developer.

And then there’s the guilt. “I feel cognitive dissonance between climate change and my strong desire to burn fossil fuels,” admits Jonathan, who runs a software company in town.

When doomsday felt nigh, back at the height of the Cold War, many school children didn’t think they’d make it to adulthood. The chronic fear of nuclear war was coined “nuclear anxiety” and it was pervasive. No wonder kids back then were reported as being unmotivated and wracked with despair. It’s altogether possible that global warming may take a similar toll on our psyches. 

Richard Kefford, Professor of Medicine at the University of Sydney, is quick to point out in an article published in The Medical Journal of Australia last year that the human response to overwhelming catastrophes is denial, despondency and paralyzing helplessness.

And frankly, what could possibly constitute “overwhelming catastrophe” better than climate change?

Now I couldn’t find any medical terms coined to describe this climate change doom and gloom. But I did find a term that is used to describe the distress caused by witnessing a change or transformation of one’s home. The man who coined the term, a philosopher at the University of Newcastle in Australia, Glenn Albrecht, likened it to being homesick at home. You yourself haven’t aren’t going anywhere, but the stable environment you grew up in is.

So perhaps I’m not so much anxious as suffering from solastalgia.

So what can I do? Mostly, chill out. I recounted my so-called “nightmare” to a (productively utilitarian) climate change scientist friend who reassured me that 50 centimeters of sea level rise in the next century shouldn’t pose a serious threat to my nesting instincts. If I was truly worried she suggested that I check the climate change forecasts before investing in property or hunkering down somewhere.

Sure enough the Sierra Club released a Google Earth program that shows how much of Vancouver’s mainland will be underwater with sea level rise. Perhaps I should get into the dike business.