From the margins: madness and history in Australia

Abstract

This Introduction situates the Australian scholarship on the histories of mental illness, madness, psychiatry and institutions in a wider perspective. It argues for the relevance and importance of histories of madness in our present.

Keywords:

• Mental health
• colonial
• historiography
• confinement
• institutions
• lived experience
• climate change

To ask what place madness has in historical studies is to ask what place, or places, madness occupies in society.¹ We now talk frequently of mental health and mental illness, and we are beginning again to talk of madness. Beneath the COVID-19 pandemic, mental disorders and conditions are reaching epidemic levels, spurred by war, displacement, inequity, and climate change. The World Health Organisation warns that one in five young people, globally, have a mental health condition.² In Australia, 4 in 10 Year 12 students report untoward symptoms of anxiety and depression, and suicide is a leading cause of death for those aged between 5 and 17 years.³

‘Madness’, construed broadly, is therefore not niche, but a common and growing presence in Australian public and private life. How did it become so? How has it been configured? How might history help us better understand the roles played by mental health and illness in our social life, politics, and culture? In this Special Issue we aim to bring histories of mental illness and mental health from the margins – where they have tended to reside – and into the mainstream of historical scholarship. In this opening essay we survey the histories of difference, suffering, creativity, and control bound up in the shorthand of mental health and mental illness. We consider why these histories have tended to be treated as peripheral to national historical narratives, indeed, to the main course of history at every scale, and ask how Australian historians are contributing to new and innovative forms of historical practice.

We argue here that historical studies of mental illness, histories of social institutions built around it such as the asylum, ‘mad’ biographies and ‘mad histories’ all offer new potential for national conversations about mental health and history. As Catharine Coleborne writes, understanding the vast confinement of populations of people diagnosed with mental illness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a response to the pressures of social formation could reshape how we talk about Australia’s past.⁴ The social institutions of the past were grand solutions not only to the problem of mental illness, but also to poverty, social isolation, homelessness, intransigence, ageing and family violence. James Dunk has revealed that madness was written into the colonial (and therefore national) project from the start – into the rough and reconfigured social connections of the penal colony and into its legal ideas and practices. His writing shows that madness allows us into the interior worlds of the men – mostly – who had formal carriage of the colonial project. It shows them at their most vulnerable, and the project at its most untenable.⁵

Historians interested in mental illness in Australia continue to build on ideas set out by Stephen Garton in the first push for social histories of medicine. His book Medicine and Madness, published in 1988, pointed to the impact of social change between the 1880s and 1940s and the shaping forces of gender, poverty and welfare.⁶ Writing about the boundaries between the asylum and families around the same time, Mark Finnane signalled important concepts of institutional care and mental illness that had international resonance. His work, alongside an emerging array of scholarly pieces about families and institutions, including by Canadian historian David Wright, helped change global thinking about the role such institutions played in nineteenth-century industrialising economies.⁷

At the turn of the century, a new generation of historical writing about mental health emerged, heralded by the volume ‘Madness’ in Australia: Histories, Heritage and the Asylum (2003).⁸ Edited by Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon, this collection gathered several strands of emerging scholarship into a productive conversation which touched on the colonial past of institutions, law and mental illness, gender and space, work and labour, the institutional administration, storytelling and abuse, and intellectual disability.⁹ The book also ventured into more innovative areas, including soundscapes and music, sexuality, grief, memory, museum collections, art and display, and the challenge of heritage, or the symbolic inheritance of former institutional sites.

More recently, Katie Holmes has explained the dimensions of oral history accounts of mental health in the twentieth century using oral evidence from the Australian Generations project.¹⁰ In her rich history of intellectual disability, Corinne Manning raised questions of oral history as a methodology appropriate for the telling of stories that told uncomfortable truths about institutional treatment.¹¹ The growing focus on critical disability studies including mental health research points to the potential for greater interdisciplinary work across scholarly boundaries, with collaboration between historians, social scientists and creative practice a fertile ground for new outcomes. It also demonstrates the benefits of a deeper engagement with people who have lived experiences of disability and mental ill-health.¹² Accounts from those living with mental illness or disability remind us of the power of scholarship to hold up transformative accounts of the past to help shape future mental health policy and practice.

Australian historians have also engaged with an international scholarship and become part of a much wider array of social and cultural histories of insanity, witnessed by the influence of their scholarship.¹³ As we describe further below, this is reinforced by the extended essay review by David Wright for this Special Issue, which shows the scope of debates and how Australian scholars feature in important ways, sometimes as leading international historical accounts of institutions, mental illness and the concerns of scholars working on critical histories of psychiatry. In these ways, and others, mental illness and mental health are being drawn into mainstream historiography, and also altering the path of that stream and extending its boundaries.

From destigmatising to destabilising

This Special Issue of History Australia encourages an act of ‘bringing in’ which runs parallel to the ongoing effort to destigmatise and normalise mental illness, and to the ongoing broadening of historical approaches in order to encompass a wider range of historical experience. There have been significant efforts in recent years to normalise mental illness, breaking down the barriers that have long been erected around those identified as mentally ill. These barriers have kept not only the ill themselves but also their perspectives and experiences separate from larger narratives. The dramatic increase in the number of users of mental health services, particularly those seeking treatments for depressive and anxiety disorders, and the widespread use of psychopharmaceuticals, has further eroded these boundaries. Mental illness is no longer seen to constitute a peripheral social group so much as a regular element of social experience.

But mental illness and madness are not yet regular elements in our general histories. What is the nature of the boundaries that have divided the history of madness from broader historical narratives? What relation do they bear to those other boundaries which have segregated people living with mental illnesses through history? Madness and mental illness have generally been the remit of medical historians, legal historians, and historians of science. This is to say that they have been historically subsumed by those professions tasked with identifying, categorising, and medically treating mental illness, and thus erasing the perspectives of those who have been classified and subject to care. Historical madness has also been broached from literary, art and cultural history, in a range of efforts to describe its contributions to the wider stream of language and culture, and to ask what the standing of those contributions reveals about narratives of self, sanity, and society.

Quite recently, madness has also begun to feature in family history and genealogical studies. For an extended period of time, these studies replicated ideas of mental illness as a source of shame – something to be ignored or papered over in family or local histories. When it did appear, it might be an oddity offered for colour and character, rather than a substantive invitation either to feel compassion or to have knowledge of alternative experiences of the world. In biographical writing, similarly, mental illness was rarely taken up as a suitable subject for study. It has only recently entered more fully into the field, to be written about in more thoughtful and sustained ways. The piece here by Katie Holmes showed that the considered turn towards these aspects of what have always, after all, been part of our shared life, resonated with audiences. The study gave a sense of immediacy, by drawing connections between the broader narrative of Australia’s past and the actual experience in the home, family, and community. Freed from its old professional commitments, the history of madness allows for, and even demands, such connections (and corrections).

The history of emotions has similarly involved new explorations of hidden, private histories; its remit has touched on mental health and illness as they course through interior worlds and affective entanglements.¹⁴ The history of madness had tended to work the different, more sharply drawn, touch points of psychiatric knowledge, medico-legal structures, and total or otherwise social institutions, as well as the harder edges of some areas of common concern in the history of art, religion, or gender. Madness and emotion do co-habit our frames of reference, placed on a kind of uneasy continuum or relational diagram, where ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’ emotions have always given way to internal states and external actions interpreted as irregular, extreme, irrational, or dangerous. Histories of emotion and histories of madness navigate the limits of subjectivity, attending to the acute effects of constructions of gender, class, and race.

However, even in these fields which have moved recently to consider madness and mental health, those who research and write about these themes have tended to operate at the margins. There is therefore much work to be done in gathering the methods and approaches used to write about madness in these disparate fields and drawing them into more central positions, highlighting the contributions they have made in their respective fields and bringing them all more clearly into the main streams of historical narrative. This is to draw on the technical knowledge of the mind and its various malaises, to pool the insights not only from medical and psychological sciences but from generations of experimentation and theorisation. This is to bring madness in from its peripheral locations at the margins of our historical consciousness – since, after all, madness has always been with us – and to turn back upon these processes of marginalisation to ask why it is, in our histories, that madness has been only an occasional visitor. Madness is not, in fact, peripheral to history, but a constant companion, a steady (if meandering) strand, a site of frequent collision between different elements of governance structures and cultural formations. It stands at the meeting of different clauses of our social contracts. We are not calling for a radical rewriting, but rather a better alignment between our historical writing (and teaching) and our historical experiences.

How, then, might our regional, national, and global histories change if we bring histories of madness and mental health into the centre? Our histories of science, of different kinds of knowledge, of religion and spirituality and politics and economics? If madness, spanning from inner turpitude to outer chaos and the clattering and shattering of social forms, is drawn into the rich conversations which characterise our historical fields? If it is allowed to arrest, to unsettle, to redirect? How, we ask, will madness change our histories?

Here we are interested in drawing attention to the recent contributions which Australian historians are already making to these endeavours and to the ways their innovative work is answering these lines of inquiry and breaking down barriers between madness and historical change. Just as mental health care registers a range of extrinsic forces which shape and constitute the experience of illness, so that those cultural, social, spiritual, economic and political exigencies are drawn into the developing frameworks of global mental health, so our histories reveal the mutual construction and dialogue that constitute not only mental illness but the broader sweep of experience.

This issue therefore situates histories of Australian madness and mental healthcare within histories of various scales and types. We have invited contributions which embed histories of madness, psychiatry, asylum, prison and hospital within the political, social, economic, and cultural currents that helped constitute them. We have sought articles from historians who explore the synergies between psychological and psychiatric theories and other kinds of knowledge and the traumatic effects of violence. Other contributions bring mental health service users (or psychiatric ‘survivors’ and those with lived experiences of madness) into historical narratives and analytical frames to write new public histories of mental illness. We aim to reveal the historical moments where histories of madness and broader political or social histories intersect particularly acutely, which may suggest revisions of well-established narratives and reveal possible trajectories for exciting new research.

Starting with the earliest histories of convicts, settlers and families also draws attention to the particular historical frames for this scholarship in the Australian context. The first contribution to this issue, by Kris Inwood and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, is an outcome of the ARC Discovery Project based at the University of Tasmania, ‘The impact of solitary confinement on convicts, 1817–1853’. This article examines the effects that the experience of solitary confinement and separate treatment had on the life courses of female convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land in the period 1803–1853. It looks at the coercive actions of the colonial state and how these impacted upon long-term health outcomes, also discerning the influence of different punishment regimes on family formation.

James Dunk delves further into the power and presence of madness and the asylum in a penal colony in his article on wrongful confinement at the end of the penal period in New South Wales. Set during the heady first free elections in the colony, the article maps the special symbolic power bound up in the deprivation of liberty in the political culture of a penal colony. It takes a civil suit seeking damages for assault and false imprisonment and uses it to explore the methods and commitments of the emerging field of the political history of madness – a field which draws marginal experience and struggle into the centre of national and social histories.

Philippa Martyr is one of a handful of historians looking at Western Australia’s histories of mental illness. In her article Martyr takes up the cases of three individual encounters with mental disorder at the turn of the twentieth century in Perth. Working at the peripheral elements of Australia’s western capital – called, rather ambivalently, the most isolated city in the world – Martyr asks how the private and public collide in the history of madness. Interrogating the impulse to diagnose long-past disorders, the article explores how the private is readily and multiply made public.

Similarly, Effie Karageorgos shows that madness was intertwined with the lives of conflict, war and protest. In 1899, the Australian colonies sent military contingents to South Africa to support the British in fighting the Boer enemy. She highlights the way that the public reaction to the war was akin to a ‘national insanity’. Colonial society, faced with increases in lunacy rates, was not only in the process of comprehending madness, but also shaping ideas about Australian nationalism in the period approaching Federation. Social change created new language: Karageorgos explores the use of ‘mad vocabularies’ by the colonial press during this time to explore the ‘arbitrary boundary’ between madness and sanity in Federation-era Australia.

In work that examines more recent approaches to the history of mental health, Robyn Dunlop and Hans Pols describe the impact of a shift towards community psychiatry from the 1960s. By the 1970s, many former mental hospital inmates were able to find their voice and build meaningful lives. Several influential consumer advocates started their activities in these organisations.

Robyn Dunlop also contributes her own article, offering an important account of the work by social workers in relation to disasters and psychiatry, suggesting another angle on the histories of community psychiatry in New South Wales and nationally. The appearance of mental health in disaster responses – such as the response to Cyclone Tracy in 1975 – dated from this time. Dunlop outlines the management of mental distress in the Northern Territory during the mid-twentieth century, when the federal government administered the Territory, and identifies concurrent changes in psychiatric practices.

In a piece that explores the relevance of the engagement and impact agenda for historians, British historian Rob Ellis and Catharine Coleborne have forged an additional pathway for historical research and writing about university partnerships and the work of historians of mental health. Building on recent collaborative projects, they show the significant possibilities of co-producing new mental health histories which bring service-users and those with lived experience into a central position. They also set out a potential blueprint for the way historians could be thinking about the future of historical projects in community and ‘industry’ contexts.

Moving our issue into different terrain in her thoughtful piece of intellectual historical writing, Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen makes a critical survey of the emerging field of neurohistory.¹⁵ Finally, and taking our work and placing it into a broader international historiography, Canada Research Chair and historian of mental health and medicine, McGill University scholar David Wright reminds us of the role Australian historians can play in the rich global scholarly scene for the histories of mental illness, psychiatry, society and cultures of treatment and care for the mad in his review essay.

The future of madness

At the University of Newcastle, a research network called ‘The Future of Madness’ has been home to several contributors to this Special Issue. The network is broadly conceived as a space for multidisciplinary work in the histories of madness, but also for promoting different methodologies and ways of knowing in the histories of mental health. What we now think the future of madness is has been shaped by the past two years of global pandemic, and by different opportunities to share our work more widely with virtual audiences. The next steps in the field, we argue, should incorporate material histories and interactions with the GLAM sector as well as relational scholarship with members of lived-experience and service-user communities.

In 2020–2021, the Future of Madness Network hosted events for the History Council of New South Wales History Week.¹⁶ In September 2020, at ‘Pictures of Madness’, six speakers reflected on madness using visual images. Karageorgos spoke to a view of a wartime hospital; Dunk to a photograph of the ‘nuclear madness’ mushrooming over Hiroshima. Coleborne spoke about an image taken from the Wellcome Collection’s ‘Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond’ exhibition in London in 2016. ‘Madlove: A Designer Asylum’ was a commissioned installation. The original idea came from artist James Leadbitter who started a series of workshops aimed to gather ideas from people with personal and professional experience of mental healthcare in the UK during 2014–2015.

The Wellcome Collection invited the contributions of people accessing mental health treatment in England in eight hospitals, working with 95 workshop participants. These included high security, low security and specialist mental health hospitals. Illustrator Rosemary Cunningham created a seven-metre panel documenting the research process. Two artists, Ben Kovalsky and James Christian, designed a conceptual model of a utopian mental health hospital. It included a peaceful forest, a treehouse, a town square with a bakery, and a market garden.¹⁷

Coleborne chose this image because it speaks to the importance of involving people with lived experiences of mental illness in the co-creation of knowledge about the histories and present views of madness. Mental illness has been the subject of many important institutional histories. We argue that we need to move towards a new form of history writing and telling stories about madness, stories that allow for dialogue and reflection on mental illness as experience. This stems from the approach by critical disability studies scholars and mad studies.¹⁸

But perhaps the most pressing issue in the future of madness and its histories is climate change. Climate change presents an existential challenge and a challenge to our health, including our mental health, but it also holds out an epistemological challenge, a call to reimagine what we do in light of what we know about the effects of our activities upon the planet and its systems. How are we addressing our work to climate change? How are we bringing these historical themes – the diversity of lived experience, inequity and suffering, togetherness and solitude, political invocations of health and wholeness – to meet climate change?

In late 2021, as we attempt to draw madness into a more central place in our histories, many are reeling from the psychological effects of planetary crisis. A large global study of young people describes climate anxiety as a global phenomenon. It finds that ‘the psychological (emotional, cognitive, social, and functional) burdens of climate change are being profoundly felt by large proportions of young people around the world’.¹⁹ Others are sceptical of the value of medicalising the effects of climate change and the language of eco-anxiety. ‘A word that means everything from anger to guilt’, notes science writer Isabel Whitcomb, ‘also means nothing’.²⁰ Or, as Australian ecophilosopher Glenn Albrecht argues, ‘it is not actually giving us any precise information about what is going wrong with respect to our emotional states and the physical state of the world’.²¹

Others suggest that ecological anxiety might be better viewed not as a disorder but as a judicious response to deranged circumstances, a ‘sign of mental health, not disorder’.²² Climate anxiety is a ‘moral emotion’, as Finnish theologian Panu Pikhala argues, engendered by ‘an accurate appraisal of the severity of the ecological crisis’. It can be a ‘practical anxiety’, an important driver for positive change.²³ Ashlee Cunsolo and Neville Ellis, in a similar move, write about ecological grief as ‘a natural and legitimate response to ecological loss’. Drawing on their work in Northern Canada and the Australian Wheatbelt, Cunsolo and others argue recently that ecological grief and anxiety point to a damaged but important ‘relationship with, or connection to, the natural world’.²⁴

Novelists are prosecuting these themes from broader vantage points. In 2016 Amitav Ghosh suggested that literature had signally failed to address the climate crisis, because the fundamental ‘derangement’ of hegemonic Western culture that had engendered the crisis still shaped and restrained its creative expression (we could say the same about the main streams of the ‘psy’ disciplines, and their historians).²⁵ Ghosh was raising a spectre earlier woken by Sigmund Freud: the idea that a society could suffer a kind of general disorder. Though it is a dangerous and deeply unpalatable idea, it has returned here and there, including, memorably, in the writing of Erich Fromm, who fled the Nazi regime to write searchingly and searingly about the philosophy and psychology of what Eric Hobsbawm would call the ‘age of extremes’.²⁶ In The Sane Society, Fromm brings madness into centre stage by making sanity marginal and contestable.²⁷ A sane society, to echo Mahatma Gandhi, would be a good idea, not least because the effects of our human derangement are beginning to register in the very systems of the planet.

How, then, might Australian historians of madness engage with these questions of general derangement, this clash between individual and societal systems of belief, behaviour and meaning? The discussion of climate anxiety, or eco-anxiety, raises a critical question which is at once of immediate and urgent interest in the present and thoroughly historical. In an era of significant ecological distress where the collapse of ecosystems threatens the continuity of human life and culture, what are the benefits and dangers of discussing planetary crises in terms of mental health and illness?

The articles in this Special Issue remind us that historians of madness have contributions to make in response to the overarching question of the ‘sanity’ of climate action and inaction. Historians of madness are well versed in the weaponisation of reason; we have studied how rationality has been co-opted into all manner of interpersonal and political skirmishes. We know how internal worlds can collide with the broader framings, perspectives, and meaning structures that are understood to constitute reality, and which do effectively govern social experience in the guise of preserving ‘sanity’. And we are trained to accommodate nuance, even contradiction. It is probably ill-advised and likely impossible to say whether ecological anxiety is rational or irrational; it appears to be a complex and ungainly mix of acuity and distortion, to be many things all spiralling out of control. Interior and exterior, thought and emotion, past and future.

The ‘future of madness’ will certainly include significant secondary and tertiary effects of a changing environment changed by human activity, and we argue here that not only psychologists and psychiatrists but historians and other humanities and social science scholars are poised to interpret these effects and understand their implications. The history of madness in Australia, like the future of madness, is fraught, contested, and profoundly significant, but it is by no means marginal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catharine Coleborne

Catharine Coleborne is a Professor and Head of the School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her books include Why Talk About Madness? (2020) and Insanity, Identity and Empire (2015). She has published articles in journals including Australian Historical Studies, Social History of Medicine and Medical History.

James Dunk

James Dunk is a Research Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Sydney. In his research, writing and teaching he works between the history of medicine, health and psychology and the environmental humanities.

Notes

1 The use of the term ‘madness’ is deliberate and derives from recent interventions in critical disability studies with the reclaiming of the term to embrace people with service-user, survivor, consumer and lived experiences of mental illness over time. See Catharine Coleborne, Why Talk About Madness? Bringing History into the Conversation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 2–5.

2 ‘Burden: Mental Health’, World Health Organization, accessed 13 December 2021, https://www.who.int/health-topics/mental-health#tab=tab_2.

3 ‘Youth and Mental Health’, Black Dog Institute, accessed 13 December 2021, https://www.blackdoginstitute.org.au/research-areas/youth-mental-health/.

4 Catharine Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire: Immigrants and Institutional Confinement in Australia and New Zealand, 1873–1910 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2015), 2–3.

5 James Dunk, Bedlam at Botany Bay (Sydney: NewSouth, 2019).

6 Stephen Garton, Medicine and Madness: A Social History of Insanity in New South Wales, 1880-1940 (Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1988).

7 Mark Finnane, ‘Asylums, families and the state’, History Workshop Journal 20, no. 1 (1985): 134–48; David Wright, ‘Getting out of the asylum: Understanding the confinement of the insane in the nineteenth century’, Social History of Medicine 10, no. 1 (1997): 137–55.

8 Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon, ed., ‘Madness’ in Australia: Histories, Heritage and the Asylum (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press/API Network, 2003).

9 See also Lee-Anne Monk, Attending Madness: At Work in the Australian Colonial Asylum, Clio Medica 84: The Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008).

10 Katie Holmes, ‘Talking about Mental Illness: Life Histories and Mental Health in Modern Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 1 (2016): 25–40.

11 Corinne Manning, Bye-bye Charlie: Stories from the Vanishing World of Kew Cottages (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008).

12 David Wright, ‘Learning Disability and the New Poor Law in England, 1834–1867’, Disability & Society 15, no. 5 (2000): 731–45; Mental Disability in Victorian England: The Earlswood Asylum, 1847–1901 (Clarendon, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001); David Wright, Downs: The History of a Disability (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

13 See for instance ‘Beyond Borders’, A Virtual Issue of Social History of Medicine: https://academic.oup.com/shm/pages/beyond-borders-virtual-issue.

14 See Catharine Coleborne and Peter N. Stearns, ‘Institutional records: A comment’, in Sources for the History of Emotions: A Guide, ed. Katie Barclay, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa and Peter N. Stearns (London, UK; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020); Catharine Coleborne, ‘Families, patients and emotions: Asylums for the insane in colonial Australia and New Zealand, 1880s–1910’, Social History of Medicine, 19, no. 3 (December 2006): 425–42.

15 Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen is writing a new book, Making Mental Health: A Global History, which will develop these ideas in more depth.

16 See ‘Pictures of Madness’, History Council of NSW, 9 September 2020, https://historycouncilnsw.org.au/events/pictures-of-madness/.

17 ‘Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond’, The Vacuum Cleaner, http://www.thevacuumcleaner.co.uk/bedlam-asylum-and-beyond/. See also James Leadbitter, ‘The lunatics are taking over the… means of production: 5 years of Madlove by the Vacuum Cleaner’, Asylum 27, no. 1 (2020), https://asylummagazine.org/2020/03/the-lunatics-are-taking-over-the-means-of-production-5-years-of-madlove-by-the-vacuum-cleaner/.

18 Brenda LeFrançois, Robert Menzies and Geoffrey Reaume, eds., Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Canadian Mad Studies (Toronto: Toronto Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2013).

19 Caroline Hickman et al., ‘Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey’, Lancet Planetary Health 5, no. 12 (1 December 2021): e863–73, https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(21)00278-3.

20 Isabel Whitcomb, ‘Is It Time to Abandon the Term “Climate Anxiety”?’, Yes! Magazine, 31 August 2021, https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2021/08/31/climate-anxiety-mental-health.

21 Glenn Albrecht, quoted in Whitcomb, ‘Is It Time to Abandon the Term “Climate Anxiety”?’.

22 S. Weintrobe, Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 241.

23 Panu Pihkala, ‘Anxiety and the Ecological Crisis: An Analysis of Eco-Anxiety and Climate Anxiety’, Sustainability 12, no. 19 (2020): 7836.

24 Ashlee Cunsolo and Neville R. Ellis, ‘Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss’, Nature Climate Change 8, no. 4 (2018): 275–81; Ashlee Cunsolo, Sherilee L. Harper, Kelton Minor, Katie Hayes, Kimberly G. Williams and Courtney Howard, ‘Ecological grief and anxiety: the start of a healthy response to climate change?’, Lancet Planetary Health 4, no. 7 (July 2020): e261–63, e262.

25 Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

26 Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (New York: Viking Penguin, 1994).

27 Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Rinehart & Co., 1955).