{"id":83663,"date":"2023-09-18T14:07:30","date_gmt":"2023-09-18T18:07:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.carilec.org\/?p=83663"},"modified":"2023-09-18T14:08:33","modified_gmt":"2023-09-18T18:08:33","slug":"how-do-we-feel-about-global-warming-its-called-eco-anxiety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/how-do-we-feel-about-global-warming-its-called-eco-anxiety\/","title":{"rendered":"How Do We Feel About Global Warming? It\u2019s Called Eco-Anxiety."},"content":{"rendered":"

After a summer of intense heat, raging fires and catastrophic floods, a term for pervading dread about climate change and other environmental crises is having its moment.<\/h4>\n
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By\u00a0<\/span>Jason Horowitz<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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Reporting from Rome<\/h5>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Italy was in the grip of extreme heat waves, hellish wildfires and biblical downpours, and a nerve-wracked young Italian woman wept as she stood in a theater to tell the country\u2019s environment minister about her fears of a climatically apocalyptic future.<\/p>\n

\u201cI personally suffer from eco-anxiety,\u201d Giorgia Vasaperna, 27, said, her eyes welling and her hands fidgeting, at a children\u2019s film festival in July. \u201cI have no future because my land burns.\u201d She doubted the sanity of bringing children into an infernal world and\u00a0asked, \u201cAren\u2019t you scared for your children, for your grandchildren?\u201d<\/p>\n

Then the minister, Gilberto Pichetto Fratin, started crying.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have a responsibility toward all of you,\u201d he said, visibly choked up. \u201cI have a responsibility toward my grandchildren.\u201d<\/p>\n

Europe is a continent on the verge of a nervous breakdown.<\/p>\n

In Greece, nerves are shot as weeks of\u00a0blazes raging out of control\u00a0have given way to flooding that has\u00a0submerged 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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0sued the state<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And, in a common refrain of the eco-anxiety era, it gets worse.<\/p>\n

The same storm that hit Greece gained strength over the Mediterranean and\u00a0pummeled Libya<\/a>\u00a0with flooding that killed thousands.<\/p>\n

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Dimos Tsiakas in the yard of his flooded home this month in the village of Palamas, Greece.Credit…Alexandros Avramidis\/Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n

A recent\u00a0United Nations report<\/a>\u00a0delivered 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\u00a0specter<\/a>\u00a0of burning in nuclear fires started by the war in Ukraine has moved to the back burner.<\/p>\n

In an era of ever-increasing anxiety, now is the summer \u2014 and autumn \u2014 of our disquiet, and eco-anxiety, a catchall term to describe all-encompassing environmental concerns, is having its moment.<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

\u201cClimate change is moving faster than psychiatry for sure and also psychology,\u201d 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 \u201ccirculating very much\u201d these days, and that the condition would only increase in the future.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen people start to be worried about the planet, they don\u2019t know that they have eco-anxiety,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen they see this thing has a name, then they understand what to call it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Cianconi and some of his colleagues\u00a0published a paper<\/a>\u00a0in June in the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine that mentioned the terms \u201ceco-PTSD,\u201d \u201ceco-burnout,\u201d \u201ceco-phobia\u201d and \u201ceco-rage.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the focus remained on eco-anxiety, which they broadly defined as a \u201cchronic fear of environmental doom\u201d suffered by firsthand victims of traumatic climate change events; people whose livelihoods or way of living is threatened by climate change; climate activists or people who work in the field of climate change; people fed images of climate change through the news media; and people prone to anxiety.<\/p>\n

Basically, everyone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Few people braved the streets of downtown Rome during an intense heat wave in July, and most of them stayed in the shade.Credit…Andrew Medichini\/Associated Press<\/p><\/div>\n

Among the characteristics of eco-anxiety, they cited \u201cfrustration, powerlessness, feeling overwhelmed, hopelessness, helplessness.\u201d There could be a combination of \u201cclinically relevant symptoms, such as worry, rumination, irritability, sleep disturbance, loss of appetite, panic attacks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sound familiar?<\/p>\n

\u201cAlready I have Latin, Greek and French exams coming up \u2014 now I have this climate anxiety, too,\u201d said Sara Maggiolo, 16, as she walked past the psychiatric wing of a hospital in Rome on a recent afternoon that cracked 100 degrees. Hardly anyone was outside except for a few tourists who clung to the shade.<\/p>\n

Earlier in the summer, Ms. Maggiolo said, she had visited the Dolomite Alps with her family and was saddened to see workers protecting glaciers from the sun with white tarps. \u201cWatching TV and seeing everything burn,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to stay interested in world problems when there won\u2019t be a world. Every summer will be hotter. It will always be worse.\u201d<\/p>\n

Psychiatrists say that for many people who have been put through the wringer over the past decade, the climate extremes are one crisis too many.<\/p>\n

Within Europe, \u201cback to back\u201d 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, \u201cand finally the climate crisis, which hit Greece particularly hard,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cConstant stress has a deeper impact on mental health than acute short-lived stress,\u201d Mr. Liapis said. \u201cThe person who\u2019s already struggling due to higher rent will be harder hit when his home floods.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Thursday, the Greek Health Ministry said it would put in place a \u201ccomprehensive program of interventions for psychosocial support\u201d for victims of the floods and send mobile units of mental health professionals to the afflicted areas.<\/p>\n

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Flooding in the suburbs of the city of Larissa, Greece, this month.Credit…Stamos Prousalis\/Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n

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. \u201cNot only the young suffer from eco-anxiety,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Some, frustrated with the paralysis of their governments, have turned to higher powers for a source of strength.<\/p>\n

At the World Youth Day event in Lisbon this summer, Pope Francis told hundreds of thousands of young Catholics to take action to protect the earth and beat back climate change. Many of the participants took his words to heart, especially as temperatures climbed and the authorities warned about dangerous conditions.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are afraid of this temperature problem,\u201d Rita Sacramento, 20, from Porto, Portugal, said as she and her friends trudged through one of the most sweltering days of the summer. She said she had seen people faint around her.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not normal,\u201d Ms. Sacramento said. \u201cWhen it is cold it is more cold. When it is hot it is more hot. Years pass and it\u2019s hotter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some experts said that for mentally healthy people, a touch of eco-anxiety could be an engine for action.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn this moment eco-anxiety is something that will bring people to act in a positive way,\u201d said Giampaolo Perna, a psychiatrist and expert in anxiety at the Humanitas San Pio X hospital in Milan. \u201cAnd try to protect the environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The aftermath of the flooding on Thursday in Derna, Libya.Credit…Esam Omran Al-Fetori\/Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n

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But he added that while climate fears were not yet a recognized pathology or driving people into therapy, they \u201ccould be a sort of stimulus\u201d for a crisis in someone who already has a general anxiety disorder.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf this becomes chronic,\u201d Dr. Perna added, \u201cin the long run this will not be healthy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some have already moved on to a new stage of planetary grief.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not so much anxiety as despair,\u201d said Leonardo Giordano, 27, who works in a health food restaurant in Rome. \u201cAnxiety would be if you have the chance to do something. I think we are beyond those times.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added with a shrug: \u201cMy family thinks I have a future to worry about. But I think I don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

Niki Kitsantonis\u00a0contributed reporting from Athens.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n