OZY Highlights | Is Climate Change Melting Your Mind?

Climate change is spawning a mental health crisis. This OZY original series unpacks the phenomenon and the coming fixes.

The unprecedented heat wave burning Europe. Forest fires and ravaged crops. New diseases. Drying lakes and melting snowcaps. The disastrous physical manifestations of climate change are all around us. Increasingly, though, a less recognized but equally significant phenomenon is taking hold: an anxiety epidemic sparked by global warming.

A growing body of research and organizations ranging from the United Nations to the American Psychological Association — the professional body of U.S. psychologists — are concluding that climate change is taking us to the edge of a mental health crisis. With each degree of increase in temperature and every new shift in our traditional environments, humans are becoming more vulnerable to often debilitating mental health conditions. Popular culture is catching up. Season 2 of the HBO hit series Big Little Lies has a key subplot that revolves around children suffering from anxiety after their class discusses “the end of the world” because of climate change.

Men have another advantage over their female counterparts, thanks to a warming planet.

It’s long been argued that climate change will see our cities flooded, our forests reduced to ash and our weather turn increasingly violent and unpredictable.

But research has found that the downside of living in a hotter, less-climate-stable world may not be limited only to buildings, trees and weather: A recently released report suggests climate change may actually affect what’s going on inside our own heads. And as with many of the adverse effects of climate change, it doesn’t affect everyone equally.

In fact, American women are 60 percent more likely than men to suffer from mental illnesses because of climate change.

Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the now widely recognized term “solastalgia.” Can he bring about a more optimistic spinoff?

You’re at home with your family on the sofa. Despite being surrounded by loved ones, melancholy is rising within you. Why? Outside the weather is no longer how it used to be. The seasons hardly resemble themselves. You turn on the television and it’s the usual: The Great Barrier Reef is in a state of crisis; polar ice caps are melting. Home in both the immediate and the planetary sense is changing. How do you feel? Isolated? Depressed? Longing for a different time?

There’s a term for this: You’re feeling solastalgic.