https://www.nationalobserver.com/2018/11/30/news/doctors-prescribe-action-eco-anxiety
[video in online article]
Doctors prescribe action for 'eco-anxiety'
By Steph Wechsler in News, Energy | November 30th 2018
Tina Yeonju Oh experiences "eco-anxiety."
Age 22, she knows a lot of other young adults who "are having internal
conversations with themselves but also with friends and family about
whether or not to have children.”
“Young people are facing this anxiety and mostly because we are the
generation to live through this crisis,” the environmental activist and
organizer told National Observer.
One of the country's top environmentalists under 25, she is a graduate
student in environmental studies at Dalhousie University and the interim
coordinator of the Canadian Youth Delegation, a group sent to
international United Nations climate conferences. Now a resident of
Halifax, she has been to conferences in Morocco and Germany.
There's an element of hopelessness, she says, that arises from the
steady barrage of doomsday reports or news about climate-accelerated
natural disasters every day.
Those observations reflect findings of a new report whose lead author,
Dr. Courtney Howard, says climate-related events have “started to shift
peoples thoughts away from thinking of climate change as something that
has to do with carbon dioxide on a graph and something that has to do
with them and their children and their health and their future.”
Grief, post-traumatic stress disorder and the eco-anxiety Oh described
are among the public health risks that will accompany an era of rampant
food insecurity, isolation and displacement, according to the Lancet
Countdown 2018 Report.
Dr. Howard said that evacuating one’s home due to the extreme weather
events that increase in frequency with climate change – such as flooding
and wildfires – creates the conditions for the sense of loss that
imperils mental wellbeing.
These stressors may increase rates of alcohol and drug abuse, said
Howard, and early research also suggests links between extreme heat and
suicide.
“Health care professionals see first-hand the devastating health impacts
of our changing climate. From wildfires to heat waves to new infectious
diseases, we’re already treating the health effects of climate change,”
said Dr. Gigi Osler, president of the Canadian Medical Association
(CMA), in a statement.
The Canadian Lancet document was prepared with support from CMA and the
Canadian Public Health Association.
As researchers discussed the Lancet report, Ontario Environment Minister
Rod Phillips presented the government's climate plan, many weeks after
repealing the former Liberal government's policies to reduce carbon
emissions. Despite consensus from policy and climate experts, Ontario's
new plan does not feature a carbon tax, which the minister referred to
as an unnecessary “dogma.”
‘I have never felt grief like that before’
On the night of U.S. President Donald Trump’s election, Oh was in
Marrakesh, Morocco for the United Nations climate conference following
the Paris Agreement. She and some others at the conference had not
expected Trump's win.
"I have never felt grief like that before,” she told National Observer.
She recalls being unable to eat or sleep.
“I think it was compounded by the fact that I was in a space where we
were talking about the urgency of climate change and how immediately and
how big the effects would be for marginalized communities all over the
world. And just feeling the weight of the most powerful politician in
the world be a climate denier.”
While Canadians are becoming more aware of the impending risks, she
said, many are inured from the consequences.
Seemingly vast natural resources and a sprawling geography mean that
many communities are “shielded away.”
“But of course those impacts are not carried proportionately by
Canadians,” said Oh. “We know that Indigenous peoples really face the
biggest burden of climate change within Canada.”
Northern communities have been the focus of early research. An example
is Inuvik, a town and region in the Northwest Territories, where a
50-year temperature increase of three degrees Celsius has been recorded,
according to the report.
“That’s a big deal when talking about the difference between solid water
and liquid water,” said Howard, referring to communities that rely on
ice roads to access hunting grounds, transportation, and friends and family.
Howard cites research out of Memorial University, where Dr. Ashlee
Cunsolo researched ecological grief in Rigolet, Nunatsiavut. The
profound changes to the land have meant “feelings of loss, of sadness,
of worry about what the future will bring for them, for their children,
and what those further changes in the environment will mean to their way
of life,” said Howard.
While more conclusive research into mental health outcomes will
hopefully emerge, Howard said she’s seeing a critical mass in dialogue,
spurred in part by a wave of climate-related episodes in recent years.
After a heatwave in Montreal that killed dozens last summer, for
example, mainstream awareness and concern is on the rise, said Howard
People may feel isolated by their grief, especially when they’re in
circles of family and friends who aren’t feeling emotional duress.
“It can be alienating. You can think to yourself, ‘well, what’s wrong
with me? Maybe I shouldn’t worry about it so much,” said Howard. “If we
talk about it, we may still feel sad, but we don’t have to feel lonely
and we don’t have to feel like those feelings make us odd. In fact, it’s
very normal to be anxious and scared if there’s a threat.”
Greg Dubord, a Canadian expert in cognitive behavioural therapy,
describes that feeling as “constructive unpleasant emotion,” said
Howard, and a utilitarian evolutionary response that’s kept people alive
this long. She likened the primordial reaction to the fight-or-flight
instinct that would cause someone to run away from a tiger behind a bush.
Now, she said, our job is to feel those emotions. And act on them.