Eco-anxiety: A looming mental health crisis

Growing up with a big heart and curious mind, Reese Fassett spent her adolescence learning about, worrying about, and protecting the planet.

She made “reduce, reuse, recycle” her mantra and by 15, she became a vegan to reduce the environmental impact of her diet. A year later, as her friends were all getting cars, she opted to commute via zero-carbon bike. By the time college came around, Fassett became president of the sustainability council and embarked on a “zero waste” journey, joining a movement that encourages participants to reduce consumption and minimize waste. But her well-intended efforts quickly turned into an unhealthy obsession.

“It was like an addiction,” Fassett said.

She continued to challenge her waste-minimizing efforts, pushing the edge of what she thought was possible in modern society. At one point, she went more than four months without filling up a single trash bag.

It wasn’t until her friends and family started reaching out, concerned about her rapid weight loss and wellbeing, that Fassett realized she’d gone too far.

“My entire relationship with food changed because I was afraid to buy anything in containers,” she said.

Though Fassett’s environmental efforts were above and beyond that of the average American, she said she would often wake up in the middle of the night, paralyzed in fear that she wasn’t doing enough to stop climate change.

“It felt like the weight of the world was on my shoulders, because I felt personally responsible for the world and future generations of civilization,” she said.

Fassett is one of a growing number of people with eco-anxiety. The American Psychological Association describes the affliction as “a chronic fear of environmental doom.”

Climate-related stress has only shown up in mainstream psychological conversation over the past five years, but has likely been a problem for much longer. According to the APA, more than two-thirds of Americans have moderate to significant distress about climate change, a figure that has doubled since 2017.

“This is particularly prevalent in young people, for whom this is much more vividly their future,” said Elizabeth Haase, a psychologist and chair of the APA’s committee on climate change and mental health. Some colleges, including the University of Michigan and the University of Oregon, have launched programs to specifically address this type of stress.

“Eco-anxiety or ecological distress really encapsulates all of the emotions that people can have in response to climate change, such as the grief that people feel, the rage that they feel, the betrayal and hopelessness, the fear on an immediate level for their own safety, as well as on an existential and intergenerational level,” Haase said.

Like Fassett, many people with eco-anxiety become overwhelmed by personal goals to mitigate their own carbon footprint.

Sami Grover is an author who writes about this struggle in his book "We’re all Climate Hypocrites Now."

“If you read up on the science, it's really, really worrying … but one of the things I've learned is that worry and anxiety only get you so far,” Grover said.

In Grover's book, he lays out the dichotomy of caring about the environment and living in a world that caters to consumption.

“The anxiety can be a useful signal that something is wrong and that we need to do something, but it can also be debilitating and stop you from doing the work that needs to be done,” Grover said.

Though composting and biking instead of driving are worthwhile endeavors, it is a small part of the solution. According to 2018 data, the fossil fuel industry accounts for 89% of all global carbon emissions.

“I really encourage people to think of this as a collective journey,” Grover said. “It's not your individual responsibility to get your carbon footprint down to zero. Instead, what’s your role in getting our collective footprint down to zero?”

Grover encourages readers to devote 95% of their environmental energy to the one place they have the most leverage and power. That might look like an executive pushing green company policies, a council member pushing green initiatives, or a pastor getting an electric church van for Sunday school.

Others have a more hopeless version of eco-anxiety, expressed as the grief of losing parts of the natural world as climate change wipes out barrier reefs, icecaps, and entire species of animals.

David Monje is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He teaches a class about climate communication.

“I don’t have a lot of hope in the future as far as the human ability to resolve these problems that are happening,” Monje said.

Monje said Grover’s advice helped him to feel more empowered by his role in the classroom.

“This is an exercise in how to be a better teacher and present information in a way that’s digestible, in a way that’s meaningful, and in a way that doesn’t lead directly to despair,” Monje said.

Another type of climate distress affects those on the front lines of natural disasters, who have already lived through the trauma of seeing their life’s work wash away in floods or fear an uncertain future. Researchers say in addition to the growing financial cost of climate change-fueled storms, there’s a mounting mental health crisis.

Duke psychiatry professor Raj Moray has been studying the mental health toll of climate disasters and projects that the impact will continue to accelerate.

“There's just going to be a lot more people suffering from depression, anxiety, and PTSD,” Moray said. “It’s going to be essential that there are more mental health resources than we currently have available.”

Though the acknowledgment of eco-anxiety is expanding, it’s still a relatively new topic in the world of psychology. Some sufferers said that they felt their concerns were not taken seriously by their therapist, further discouraging them. One student, who wanted to remain anonymous, said she went to her counselor in tears because she felt so hopeless about the future that she was afraid to have children. She wanted to discuss her feelings and learn strategies to manage her stress, but instead felt that her concerns were dismissed and invalidated.

Haase said hearing about those experiences was an impetus to start a climate-aware training program for mental health professionals. Now, the Climate Psychiatry Alliance and the Climate Psychology Alliance developed a brief training course to help therapists be better equipped to empathize with and help patients manage their ecological distress.

For those feeling eco-anxiety, Haase says the first step is acknowledging their feelings. “It’s completely normal to feel this way,” said Haase. She suggests speaking with a climate-aware therapist, journaling, spending time in nature, and joining together with like-minded individuals for community support or collective action.

Fassett says after therapy and re-learning to be “normal about trash,” she’s found a happy medium between her emotional wellbeing and her environmental activism.

“Go green, just don’t go crazy,” she said.