Climate anxiety is not a mental health problem. But we should still treat it as one

ABSTRACT

Climate anxiety refers to pervasive worry and apprehension about climate change. Scholars have stressed that climate anxiety is a normal and healthy response to climate change that can motivate climate action and should therefore not be medicalized. This article considers the inadvertent consequences associated with not treating climate anxiety as a mental health problem.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate anxiety
• mental health
• psychology
• climate change

Quotes in this article are from an interview study on climate anxiety recently conducted in the Netherlands (results forthcoming). Names have been changed to ensure the anonymity of the interviewees. Quotes have been translated by the author from Dutch to English and edited for this article.

“I often think the whole world is going to hell, and we are doing nothing to stop it,” says Thomas, a 29-year-old sustainability manager at a university of applied science.

Thomas is one of many people around the globe who are concerned about climate change. Almost 80 percent of Europeans consider climate change a very serious problem, and more than a quarter think it is the most serious problem facing the world (European Commission 2021). In the United States, 66 percent of people are somewhat or very worried about climate change (Leiserowitz et al. 2023). For some people, like Thomas, concern can spiral into distress. “Climate change will lead to climate refugees, wars for scarce resources, enormous conflicts; it really worries me,” he says. Thomas’ emotions about climate change range from sadness and depression to anger, frustration, and disbelief. “We have something beautiful, and we are ruining it. I simply don’t understand why we are doing this,” he concludes.

The thoughts and feelings Thomas experiences have a name: climate anxiety. Sometimes referred to as eco-anxiety, climate anxiety is a pervasive and sometimes uncontrollable worry and apprehension about climate change (van Valkengoed, Steg, and de Jonge 2023). It can be accompanied by physiological and behavioral indicators of stress, such as tension, a knot in the stomach, and difficulty sleeping.

Climate anxiety is not rare. One in 10 Americans say they feel nervous, on edge, or anxious about climate change with some regularity, and 3 percent even breach the threshold of clinically significant levels of anxiety about climate change (Uppalapati et al. 2023).

Is climate anxiety a mental health problem? Given the scale of current and future climate change impacts, coupled with the slow progress in reducing carbon dioxide emissions, it is not strange or unusual that people are starting to feel stressed out, anxious, or even panicked about climate change.

But categorizing climate anxiety as a mental health problem would raise issues of its own, implying, for instance, that people who are having a reasonable reaction to the climate crisis are mentally ill. For this reason, many scholars have stressed that climate anxiety is a normal and healthy response to climate change and should not be medicalized (e.g. Bhullar et al. 2022). “If we label eco-anxiety as a [mental] illness, climate denialists have won,” writes Lawton (2019) in New Scientist.

Scholars are rightfully concerned about medicalizing or pathologizing climate anxiety. However, there may be inadvertent consequences associated with not treating climate anxiety as a mental health problem, too.

Let’s first consider the implications for researchers conducting scientific studies on climate anxiety. If climate anxiety is considered a normal and healthy response to the climate crisis, there would be, strictly speaking, no reason for researchers to focus on ways to reduce climate anxiety. Studies aimed at testing whether interventions such as mindfulness or acceptance and commitment therapy are effective in reducing climate anxiety would, therefore, be redundant.

Yet, to the people experiencing it, climate anxiety can be an enormous burden. Deborah, a 40-year-old government employee at an environmental agency, says her worries about climate change significantly affect her day-to-day life: “It’s always there. It makes me feel very restless and powerless. I’ve even had a panic attack about it once. It was 35 degrees [Celsius, or 95 degrees Fahrenheit] in the Netherlands, that was an enormous trigger for me.” As a consequence, people are, understandably, looking for ways to alleviate their climate anxiety. Two percent of US adults say they are already discussing their feelings about global warming with a counselor or therapist, and 7 percent indicate they would be interested in doing so (Uppalapati et al. 2023).

Yet there is currently a dearth of research-backed information on which interventions are helpful in reducing climate anxiety. The gold standard for intervention studies are randomized controlled trials. In such studies, the effectiveness of interventions is determined by randomly assigning participants to either the intervention group or the control group, and examining any changes in the outcome of interest before and after the intervention across the two groups. A paper that conducted a systematic review on intervention studies to reduce climate anxiety concluded that such assessments have not yet been published (Baudon and Jachens 2021). In fact, this review found only two studies that empirically examined whether some form of intervention could potentially help people cope with climate anxiety, one of which was a qualitative study from 2013 that focused on analyzing dreams. It may not come as a surprise that therapists indicate they feel underprepared to help people who are experiencing climate anxiety (Hoppe et al. 2023).

Studies have also consistently shown that climate anxiety is associated with climate action, such as reducing your carbon footprint and engaging in collective action. Different scholars have therefore characterized climate anxiety as a source of motivation for climate action (e.g. Whitmarsh et al. 2022). Yet, this characterization implies that if the goal is to motivate climate action, then scientists should explore ways to sustain or even increase people’s climate anxiety.

Not only are there clear ethical concerns to this, but this will also not work for practical reasons. Climate anxiety is not the only force, or even a necessary one, that determines whether people engage in climate action. Personal values, norms, and attitudes also play a role in determining pro-environmental behavior, as well as contextual and social factors. Compared to more robust and stable characteristics such as values or personal norms, climate anxiety is likely an unsustainable source of motivation for climate action.

Not considering climate anxiety a mental health problem also influences the discourse on how people should cope with climate anxiety. Already, much of the advice offered online suggests that climate anxiety should be dealt with by taking action to solve or reduce the impacts of climate change as much as possible (e.g. Peterson 2021), for example by reducing your own carbon footprint, or by engaging in political activism. While these can be hugely important to addressing climate change, it is questionable whether action is really an antidote to anxiety, too.

Even if an individual goes all in on pro-environmental behavior and activism, they can simply not resolve the climate crisis by themselves in the short term. While reducing one’s personal carbon footprint may relieve a sense of guilt or shame about contributing to the problem, the impacts of climate change still loom large. And while activism can be a way to find like-minded people who share your concerns, and could be a source of sympathy, solace, and social connection, it can also negatively affect people’s mental and physical health, potentially leading to activist fatigue or even burnout (Chen and Gorski 2015).

There is an unresolved tension between medicalizing or pathologizing an essentially normal human response to a crisis and being able to offer appropriate care to people in distress. Notably, this tension is not unique to climate anxiety.

In 2022, prolonged grief disorder was included in the revision of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which forms the principal guideline for psychologists and psychiatrists to diagnose and treat mental disorders. The decision to include prolonged grief disorder, which is defined as intense grief lasting longer than a year, was (and is) a highly controversial decision (Cara 2022). Diagnosing grief as a mental disorder is clearly morally objectionable to many psychologists. At the same time, psychologists recognize the debilitating impacts grief can have on people, and that they can benefit greatly from psychological care.

A diagnosis on the basis of the DSM is also necessary in many countries to receive appropriate care and to be reimbursed for it by healthcare providers. Eisma (2023, 948), a clinical psychologist at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, aptly captures this tension in his review on the controversy surrounding prolonged grief disorder: “[U]nless we drastically change how health care is organized, researchers and clinicians have to choose between two ‘evils’ when making a choice on diagnosing [prolonged grief disorder] in some bereaved persons.”

Climate anxiety similarly places us in this uncomfortable position. It is hard to argue that climate anxiety represents anything but a proportional and normal response to the severity of the climate crisis. Feelings of anxiety can also be functional, fueling action and motivating us to address problems head-on.

At the same time, climate anxiety represents a source of distress and suffering to many and can profoundly impact day-to-day functioning. Should the potential of climate anxiety to galvanize climate action outweigh the distress it causes to individual people? While climate anxiety may be important in motivating action in the short term, it cannot form a consistent or sustainable base for climate action. The timescale at which the human body can psychologically and physiologically sustain a state of anxiety and the time scale necessary to solve the climate crisis differ by many orders of magnitude. Being in a constant state of distress is neither desirable nor realistic, and finding ways to reduce climate anxiety should therefore be an important goal for scientists and practitioners alike. While climate anxiety is not a mental health problem, it is urgent and necessary that we start treating it like one.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Traci White for her feedback on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes on contributors

Anne M. van Valkengoed

Anne M. van Valkengoed is a postdoc in environmental psychology at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Her work aims to understand how people perceive and respond to climate change. She is currently working on a range of topics including climate anxiety, pro-environmental behavior, and adaptation to climate change.