Climate chaos is here. So I’m posting a question or topic every week about something every one of us is likely to face, to see if we can work together to figure out ways to survive.
Week 1’s question was Do You Stay or Do You Go?
Week 2: What Is Your Timeline?
Week 3: What Skill Do You Need To Learn?
Week 4: How Will You Deal With Flooding?
Week 5: What About Potable Water?
Week 6: Got Energy?
Week 7 : What Are Your Preparations For A Food Emergency?
Week 8: Do You Have Enough Nutrients?
Week 9: What Are Your Plans For Fire?
Week 10: What will you do about medical care?
This week the question is about What are your plans for mental health?
Climate chaos has enormous impacts on mental health
Mental health issues caused by climate change are already being seen around the globe. These include trauma, depression, grief, loss, self-harm, violence, negativity, isolation, anxiety, PTSD, chronic stress, addiction, suicide, moral distress, and even neurological conditions and reduction in intelligence (See Climate Change and Disorders of the Nervous System in The Lancet, and “Climate change is affecting mental health literally everywhere” at Yale Climate Connection).
Add in war, violence, loss of income, loss of housing, loss of ecosystem, loss of a way of life — all caused by climate change — and the mental health impacts are amplified.
And our mental health systems are already in crisis
The impacts of the pandemic (itself a climate chaos event) on mental health cannot be overstated. From the abstract of “The impact of COVID-19 on the mental health workforce: A rapid review” (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...)
Mental healthcare workers worldwide experienced a range of work‐related and personal adversities during the pandemic. Key work‐related outcomes included increased workload, changed roles, burnout, decreased job satisfaction, telehealth challenges, difficulties with work‐life balance, altered job performance, vicarious trauma and increased workplace violence. Personal outcomes included decreased well‐being, increased psychological distress and psychosocial difficulties.
Workforce shortages, increased workloads, and burnout were already problems before the pandemic. Since 2020, these situations have all worsened.
Ignoring mental health has consequences
Humans spend our lives trying to figure out how to best live in the world. If we are convinced that nothing we do will make anything better, we grow angry, apathetic, doomerist, violent, and possibly suicidal. These methods of trying to cope with mental health problems cause harm, and they badly impact not only the individual living with them but also the people around them. None of these coping methods helps with the conditions that caused the distress in the first place.
There are other options
The standard recommendations for individual mental health are to find purpose in action, community, and nature. These can manifest in different ways for different people; action can be volunteering or doing a solo activity that has personal meaning, for instance.
*community
Most of the sources I’ve seen strongly recommend connecting to community, which could be family, religious group, volunteer group, team, or some other configuration of people coming together to pursue a common interest or goal or who have interests in common. Beware of cults.
*action
Most sources also strongly recommend acting for others, giving back, taking care of the needs of others, or investing in the continuity of life. Multiple studies show mental health benefits from helping others; it is strongly tied to individual happiness.
*nature
All the sources I’ve seen say that being outdoors in nature is vital to our mental health and happiness. The unspoken (so far) corollary is that you need an intact ecosystem for this, that being outdoors in an ecosystem you know and that is badly damaged is not going to help your mental health. Unless, of course, you’re out there to help repair the ecosystem, taking us back to action.
What are your plans for mental health?