Depression v. Climate Anxiety

A diagnostic guide

Climate anxiety is not just a thing, but a rapidly growing thing, especially among young people.

Not surprising. The younger you are, the longer you’ll have to live with the consequences of our fossil fuel addiction. 

Assuming, of course, you’re fortunate enough to live as long as we currently expect to.

The climate crisis has triggered a mental health crisis. Around the world, parents, teachers, counsellors, priests, social scientists, politicians and psychiatrists are all struggling to work out how to deal with climate anxiety. 

Everywhere, we’re trying to convince worried people they should have children, they should take careers seriously, they should abandon damaging recreational drugs that alleviate their symptoms. 

We’re using the same standard-issue grab-bag of treatments available to treat climate anxiety as we use for depression; pills, talk therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, etc..

The two conditions, depression and climate anxiety, are easily confused. They share symptoms: low mood, fatigue, lack of motivation, low self-worth. But their causes are entirely different. 

Why are we treating these two conditions as if they have the same cause, just because the symptoms are the same?

The best cure for any malady is to remove the cause. 

Immediate, urgent, radical action to draw down carbon won’t make all the problems go away. It will, however, mitigate the most catastrophic impacts on our species of our sudden tinkering with planetary physics.

We’d suggest this may have a better chance of diminishing some of the climate anxiety epidemic. Unlike depression, caused by irrational fear, climate anxiety is based on rational analysis. 

So let’s say we all wake up tomorrow, decide to get our act together now, and keep carbon in the ground.

Let’s say our leaders re-prioritise their to-do list. They cross out ‘national interest’, ‘blame someone else’ and ‘popular’. They replace them with reversing the impacts of greenhouse gases, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss etc. 

Let’s imagine our politicians stop trying to convince us there’s a ‘normal’ to which we can revert. Instead, they start explaining their least worst solutions to adapting to the climate change that’s already baked in.

This wouldn’t return us all to the ‘normal’ we’re encouraged to still think possible. Nor would it prevent many very bad things from happening. It might, however, help alleviate some of the symptoms of climate anxiety. 

So here’s our guide to spotting the difference between depression and climate anxiety:

• One gives you the irrational illusion you should be able to fix it yourself.

• The other gives you the rational belief you can’t.

Our cure, then: tell our politicians to revise their to-do lists.

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See Through News is a non-profit social media network with the Goal of Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active

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