Anxiety levels over man-made climate change and the impending planetary apocalypse it’s sure to bring has gotten so bad, activists are launching “self-care” workshops and psychologists are prescribing medication to children to help people cope with the stress.
And no, this is not a story from The Onion. This is real. Children are actually being given drugs because their parents have told them the ice caps are supposedly melting.
Of one such "self-care" seminar, The Daily Beast writes:
There were dance parties, DJ sets, drum classes and tutu-making workshops. Still, despite the buoyant mood it wasn’t just another festival tailor-made for glossy Instagram photos. Instead, Catharsis on the Mall, which was inspired by Burning Man and took place on the National Mall in May, had a different aim— healing. Not surprisingly part of the conversation included climate change and within 24 hours of a climate anxiety session being announced, all the seats were reserved. Amid laughter and ambient festival noise 30 people gathered in a hot tent and sat on rugs and lawn chairs to talk about their feelings of despair, depression, and anxiety.
The workshop apparently included small groups in which attendees were “asked to jot down emotions they felt when thinking about climate change” and “discussionsabout coping mechanisms including breathing exercises, yoga, meditation, and stretching.”
Laura Schmidt, an activist in Arizona, even developed an entire 10-step program modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous where climate change activists can learn “self-care,” including “how to properly accept, process, and act upon the feelings that the severity of climate change can bring” and remove “the pressure off the individual to save the world.”
Perhaps even more shockingly is the fact that Schmidt actually found about 250 people to participate.
Over at Australian-based “The Conversation,” Fiona Charlson explains that while climate change has been dubbed by some governments as a “health crisis” that threatens people’s physical state, “More generally, people feeling distressed about the state of the planet may find themselves in a spiral of what’s been termed ‘eco-anxiety.’”
“For many Australians, the existential dread of what the future holds in the face of unmitigated climate change is having documented impacts on their mental health,” she writes. “Australia’s youth have been exemplary at voicing their despair and ‘eco-anxiety’ around the foreseeable deterioration of our planet.”
The stress level over climate change has gotten so bad, some groups are even warning parents to stop “terrifying” their children over the planet’s imminent doom because so many kids are now being treated for “eco-anxiety.”
The U.K.-based Telegraph reports:
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 symptoms are the same [as clinical anxiety], the feelings are the same, but the cause is different,” claims Caroline Hickman, a teaching fellow at Bath and executive over at the Climate Psychology Alliance. “The fear is of environmental doom - that we’re all going to die.”
Fretting over the Great Coral Reef, popping Xanax to cope with the Earth's impending demise.
Must be nice to have so few actual problems to stress over.