Long, Interesting Article On Climate Despair - How It Effects Individuals, Generations

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Fom a distance, climate despair may seem like ordinary anxiety and depression in patients who happen to be fixating on climate, but it's hard to deny the unique effect climate change is having on mental health. On May 5, a group of psychologists and psychotherapists in Sweden published an open letter to their government that noted the perverse status quo of climate change—the concern wasn't so much that the environment is breaking down, but that nothing was being done about it.

Specifically, the letter noted that children are aware that the grown-ups are leaving them a shitty world, and that's a really messed-up thing to be aware of when you're a kid. "A continued ecological crisis without an active solution focus from the adult world and decision makers poses a great risk that an increasing number of young people are affected by anxiety and depression," reads the letter, in Swedish.

Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist who led the recent worldwide school strikes, said in her 2018 TED Talk that knowing about climate change was hell on her young psyche. "When I was 11 I became ill. I fell into depression. I stopped talking and I stopped eating. In two months, I lost about 10 kilos of weight." She would later be told she had Aspergers, OCD, and was selectively mute. Then she came out of her despair, and found a voice when she decided to strike—refusing to go to school until the world demonstrated that it's getting its shit together.

Simply reading facts about climate change can produce reactions not too dissimilar to Thunberg's. The Uninhabitable Earth calls climate change "the end of normal," explaining, "We have already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place, in an unsure and unplanned bet on just what that animal can endure." Last year's UN report on humanity's probable failure to stop warming short of the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold had a similar message, as did the one from May about how 1 million species are on track to go extinct due to human-caused environmental degradation, assuming we don't change our course and stop generating greenhouse gases (alongside other forms of environmental havoc). Also in May, an Australian think tank called climate change "a near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilization."

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https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j5w374/climate-despair-is-making-people-give-up-on-life