Children seeking help for their ‘eco-anxiety’
Psychologists report rise in number of youths afflicted by the ‘rational’ fear of environmental doom
Parents are being warned against terrifying youngsters with talk of climate catastrophe as rising numbers of children are being treated for “eco-anxiety”. Protests by groups such as Extinction Rebellion, the recent fires in the Amazon and apocalyptic warnings by Greta Thunberg, the teenage activist, have prompted more young people to seek help. The Climate Psychology Alliance said some children complaining of eco-anxiety have been given psychiatric drugs.
RISING numbers of children are being treated for ‘eco-anxiety’, experts have claimed, as they warn parents against “terrifying” their youngsters with talk of climate catastrophe.
Protests by groups such as Extinction Rebellion, the recent fires in the Amazon and apocalyptic warnings by Greta Thunberg, the teenage activist, have prompted more young people to seek help. A group of psychologists working with the University of Bath says it is receiving a growing volume of enquiries from teachers, doctors and therapists unable to cope.
The Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) told The Daily Telegraph some children complaining of eco-anxiety have even been given psychiatric drugs.
The body is campaigning for anxiety specifically caused by fear for the future of the planet to be recognised as a psychological phenomenon.
However, the CPA does not want it classed as a mental illness because, unlike standard anxiety, the cause of the worry is “rational”.
“A lot of parents are coming into therapy asking for help with the children and it has escalated a lot this summer,” said Caroline Hickman, a teaching fellow at Bath and a CPA executive. “The symptoms are the same [as clinical anxiety], the feelings are the same, but the cause is different.
“The fear is of environmental doom – that we’re all going to die.” Swedish 16-year-old Miss Thunberg rose to global fame this year as she supported the protests by Extinction Rebellion, which brought parts of central London to a standstill.
Miss Thunberg argues that the EU must cut its carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2030 to avoid an existential crisis – double the target set by the Paris Accord – while Extinction Rebellion demands the UK achieve net-zero emissions by 2025.
The G7 summit in Biarritz last month was also dominated by a row between France and Brazil over the Amazon fires after Emmanuel Macron said that the Earth’s “lungs” were burning. Ms Hickman said parents should talk to their children about global warming but should not say mankind is doomed.
“Parents need to find some words to talk about it that is age-appropriate and not terrifying,” she said.
“You need to separate fact from unknown: tell them some species are going extinct and some humans are being harmed, but don’t say we’re all going to die, because that isn’t true. What you don’t want is that child to collapse in a well of depression saying ‘what’s the point in going to university?’, or ‘what’s the point of doing my exams?’.” The CPA recommends a staged approach to responsibly explaining climate change to children. Parents should first gradually introduce them to known facts, then ask them how they feel, before acknowledging that the ultimate outcome is uncertain. Finally, parents should agree practical steps to make a difference, such as cutting down on non-recyclable waste and choosing food with a better climate footprint.
In 2017 the American Psychological Association produced a report recognising the impact of eco-anxiety.
In 1977 a diminutive 74-year-old woman in tweed stood up to address the great and good of US psychology at a conference in New York. The audience muttered, checked their watches and heckled as Dr Claire Weekes explained her pioneering work on anxiety and that the prevailing psychoanalysis methods her peers relied on did more harm than good.
The response was muted. “They didn’t see her as one of them,” recalls her biographer, Judith Hoare. “They had all heard from patients who had found her books very useful, but they didn’t think this old women in ordinary looking clothes could cut it.”
By then, Weekes had a bestseller in Britain and the US, with her 1962 Self Help for Your Nerves and two further books translated into at least eight languages. Despite lack of acceptance from her contemporaries, she would go on to be regarded, according to Hoare, as “the hidden hand behind the modern therapeutic manual” and the woman who cracked the anxiety code.
The treatment method pioneered by Weekes was deceptively simple. She offered her patients just six words to confront their anxiety: face, accept, float, let time pass. Today, she continues to inform neuroscience and modern psychological techniques such as mindfulness and cognitive behavioural therapy. The writer and mental health campaigner Matt Haig is among the many modern-day champions of her work.
Hoare, a 66-year-old former newspaper journalist turned author, first came across Weekes’s work when she was in her 20s suffering her own anxiety. Working in the press gallery of the Australian parliament in Canberra, a woman in a macho high-pressure environment, she started to suffer heart palpitations, causing more anxiety. But when she picked up a copy of Weekes’s book she “was struck by the simplicity of her explanation for anxiety and what she quaintly called ‘nerves’. I could feel this immense understanding and sympathy.”
Weekes, who died in 1990 aged 87, never trained as a psychologist. After growing up in a middle-class household, she read zoology at the University of Sydney. In her 20s, she was wrongly diagnosed with tuberculosis, causing her own anxiety to spiral. In a 1978 interview, she said of the doctor who denied her reassurance: “One word from him then about sensitisation would have saved me two years of worry and suffering, but perhaps it was just as well because what I learned then has helped me help hundreds of thousands of people.”
Despite the stress, she continued to excel in her studies and in 1929 won a Rockefeller scholarship to University College London. There, she met an Australian First World War hero, Marcel Aurousseau, who became her lover. He tried to alleviate her stress by describing the experiences of shell-shocked troops during the Battle of the Somme, in which he fought, and how soldiers would employ mental tricks to manage their trauma. His experiences proved a founding tenet of
Weekes’s theories. As an evolutionary scientist and medical doctor, she focused on the nervous system, how it engages both body and mind. She identified fear of fear as the central cause of anxiety, specifically two different fears to be managed differently to break the anxiety cycle. First was the primitive uncontrollable “fight or flight” alarm, then a second fear which reflected on the first. “She didn’t believe in looking at cause,” Hoare says. “She believed the symptoms themselves were at the heart of anxiety.”
The pair became engaged but Weekes broke it off. A few years later, she met the Australian pianist Elizabeth Coleman with whom she lived for the rest of her life. According to Hoare, it is not known whether or not they were lovers, but she describes them as “soulmates”.
During the Second World War, Weekes retrained in medicine, ostensibly to help soldiers returning from the conflict, and in 1945 started working as a GP in the Sydney suburbs. She saw ever more anxiety cases, particularly among housewives, as men tended to hide away in the office or pub. Soon regarded as a specialist, she once said: “I recognised in my patients what I had suffered myself.”
She was working at a time when mental health was still taboo. “People didn’t admit to it and there was shame associated to it,” Hoare says.
Weekes also broke new ground by speaking to patients of a “cure”. She had little time for the Freudian dominated psychoanalysis of the time in which patients were encouraged to lie on a sofa and delve deeply into their own psyche. She worked with patients on controlling their minds to stem physical symptoms of anxiety: headaches, racing heart, dizziness and insomnia.
While not totally adverse to prescribing sedatives (the antidepressants of the age), she had little time for what she called “the chemical imbalance fashion”. “She said once you get your nerves under control, the chemistry would right itself normally,” Hoare says. “The objective was to get people completely free from drugs.
“Instead of people fearing they had deep-seated problems that needed to be excavated, she explained that what felt abnormal was just a trick of the nerves. She did not label people. It was just nervous illness.”
Her first book was an instant hit. At first, just 500 copies were printed, but they sold out in three hours. Many books followed over the decades, prompting Weekes to tour the globe. While never gaining full acceptance by the psychiatric establishment in her own lifetime, her work endures. “Any psychologist today will talk about fear and how it works biologically,” says Hoare. “She was explaining that 50 years ago.”
Dismissed at one time as a “populist” Weeks’s ideas have finally moved into the mainstream. The distinguished US psychologist Dr David Barlow, whom Hoare contacted for her book, says the treatments she helped develop have provided “unending benefit to millions of patients” over the years.
The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code (Scribe, £14.99) is out now
‘She explained that what felt abnormal was just a trick of the nerves’