Many young people are devastated by climate change. But from despair springs action, study suggests

When speaking with Salon in 2021, twenty-six-year-old climate activist Kidus Girma expressed anxiety about the future of the planet — but, at the same time, some hope that he might be able to play a tiny part in making things better.

"I'm thinking about what we need as human beings, and what my small role in that is, and what the big role is for all of us," Girma told Salon at the time.

While it may seem paradoxical to both despair for the future and hope that one can change it, a recent study in the journal PLOS Global Public Health demonstrates that this attitude is quite common among young people today. Indeed, after surveying over 500 British young adults (between the ages of 16 and 24) for their views on climate change and life more generally, the researchers from Imperial College London and the University of Queensland found respondents feel motivated even as they also harbored negative thoughts about the future.

"Our work suggests that emotions linked to climate change may inspire action-taking, which has implications for how we communicate about climate change," the authors write after pointing out that, despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, respondents remained "distressed about climate change." They added, "Our findings also highlight the need for targeted, climate-aware psychosocial support to sustain young people's climate engagement and mental health simultaneously."

The study authors sent out survey questions that asked respondents to discuss "general mental health, subjective wellbeing and climate distress" by ranking their emotions along existing scales. They found that young people were more likely to feel "climate distress" if they had observed their natural environments change for the worse, believed they lacked control over their future, were frustrated over their own inactivity and/or felt shame or guilt about their own behavior. These same individuals with high climate distress (10.1% of the total sample) said that they worried about climate change more than any other topic, including relationships, careers, personal finance and politics.

"It is now well established that the impacts of climate change go beyond geophysical changes," the authors explain. "Our findings highlight that — even in the absence of direct climate-related experiences — distress about climate change is affecting young people's aspirations, breeding distrust and frustration with decision-makers, and potentially curtailing their personal growth."

Not surprisingly, all of these developments also create and exacerbate anxiety disorders, although those who engage in climate activism do often feel better after doing so.

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"The emotional responses that drive engagement in climate activism appear to have short-term positive impacts such as finding supportive communities and hope in collective action," the authors conclude. "We do not know whether maintaining climate distress may have negative consequences in the longer term."

A 2017 report by the American Psychological Association defined "eco-anxiety" as "a chronic fear of environmental doom." Although eco-anxiety is not a diagnosable mental health condition, it is widely used by mental health professionals as an informal term for people depressed or anxious about the future due to climate change. A 2021 study in The Lancet Planetary Health found that out of more than 10,000 people surveyed in 10 countries — all of them between the ages of 16 and 25 — more than 45 percent described climate change distress as negatively affecting their daily life and ability to function while 75 percent were "frightened" of the future and 50 percent described feeling guilty, helpless and powerless.

"The psychosocial demands of the climate crisis also call for an examination of how our clinical formulations and treatments can reinforce counterproductive extracting, hyper individuation, monetizing, producing, consuming, and commodifying self-identities and values," Gary Belkin, the former executive deputy commissioner of the New York City Department of Mental Health and Hygiene, wrote in an editorial for the American Psychiatric Association's newsletter Psychiatric News. At the same time, there is also a converse phenomenon of individuals reacting to climate change by feeling anxiety but repressing it. Therapist Arielle Cook-Shonkoff broke down those divergent responses for Salon last year when discussing patients in Sonoma County, California coping with that state's now-frequent wildfires.

"In nearby communities directly impacted by wildfires, like Sonoma County, my colleagues are treating many more clients for climate-related mental health issues: PTSD, anxiety, depression, trauma," Cook-Shonkoff wrote. "And yet, a mere 40 miles away, in the Bay Area, there is an 'out of sight, out of mind' mentality. If people don't have to think about it, then they won't."