Canadians grapple with climate anxiety
Mental-health effects from planetary crisis an understated public health challenge
It was early May and wildfire season had already started to rage in Western Canada when seven people settled into a monthly supportgroup meeting over Zoom.
The facilitator, Toronto-based Kady Cowan, opened the conversation by prompting others to acknowledge any climate change-related concerns weighing on their minds. Worrying her, Cowan said in her soothing voice, were the unprecedented “zombie fires” burning in British Columbia that feed on peat and woody tree roots over the winter and re-emerge in the spring.
Discussion gradually ramped up as others on the call shared their own concerns during what Cowan calls the “climate sanctuary,” a peer-support group she founded more than four years ago for people in climate-linked roles, both professional and volunteer.
“It’s not abnormal to be distressed when you’re watching a world around you evaporate — the types of things that we all relied on disappearing,” Cowan said in an interview. “You’re not sick to be worried about that.”
Climate peer-support groups, like Cowan’s, are increasingly recognized as one way to help build mental-health resilience in a world that can sometimes appear indifferent to the effects of climate change.
The impetus for the group came out of the “huge disconnect” Cowan said she felt between what scientists had to say about climate change and the inaction it was met with by decision makers.
Anger and resentment started to build, and it had no place to go, she said.
“People burn out of this work fast because of a lot of different reasons, not least of which is that the issues are so big that it becomes overwhelming,” said Cowan, who has spent much of her career on efforts to make the health-care sector more environmentally sustainable.
Yet, as more Canadians grapple with catastrophic impacts of climate-fuelled extreme weather, the question of how a person can keep up the fight for planetary health while tending to their mental health has extended beyond the environmental circles.
Mental-health effects from climate change have been dubbed a pressing, but still largely understated, public health challenge in Canada.
A report prepared for the Public Health Agency of Canada last year, based on interviews with more than 20 key public health experts, said the impacts had been underestimated and Canada’s healthcare system was “wholly unprepared and understaffed to address this growing issue.”
Climate anxiety is a piece of that larger public health challenge. It often refers to the heightened distress a person feels about the impending threat of climate change. Those fears may be rooted in a direct experience with extreme weather or exposure to climate change messages.
“There is a looming mentalhealth crisis coming with this anxiety about the climate crisis,” said Nate Charach, a Toronto psychiatrist who hosts climate-focused group psychotherapy sessions.
It’s not considered a mental illness — and, in fact, some researchers argue it’s an appropriate response to the scale of the crisis — but climate anxiety has been characterized by symptoms such as dread, trouble sleeping and obsessive thinking that can disrupt a person’s daily life.
“One of the major problems that I see is that people don’t feel permission to feel some of the things they’re feeling,” Charach said. “That’s where the mental-health crisis comes in, because I’m feeling this way and being told I can’t feel this way, but I can’t change that hopelessness either and then you get stuck.”
Support groups can help, experts say, as can engaging in activities that could be viewed as taking action against climate change.
Some of the most “successful interventions” for climate anxiety are to get people involved at a local level, whether taking part in a neighbourhood cleanup or an environmental rally, Palmer-Fluevog said.
While last year’s PHAC report noted there’s limited data about climate anxiety in Canada, there are some indications of just how widespread it’s become. Researchers out of Lakehead University conducted a survey of people between ages of 16 and 25 across Canada and found four in 10 reported that their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily functioning.