‘Eco-anxiety’ about the doomed state of humanity in the face of catastrophic global warming is leading climate researchers to quit and decide not to have children. BBC News has more.
Until two years ago Jennifer Newall was working at the forefront of climate change research.
Her PhD on melting ice sheets and changing sea levels had taken her to Antarctica, Scandinavia and the USA but it was while leading a workshop for primary school children in Glasgow that she began to question what she was doing.
“It dawned on me,” she says. “The physics behind this haven’t changed in my lifetime. They’re not going to change going forward.”
Jennifer says she realised action was needed urgently and she no longer had the passion or motivation to continue studying the effects.
She put her career on hold in order to take more direct action but she found the scale of the challenge overwhelming.
Jennifer is one of a growing number of people who have experienced ‘eco-anxiety’ – a chronic sense of hopelessness and fear of environmental doom.
“It presented itself as depression and anxiety,” she says. She felt completely paralysed and often unable to get out of bed.
It was during what she describes as her “eco-grief” that 33-year-old Jennifer decided she could not have children.
She says: “I don’t feel like I can have children, because a) the world can’t cope and b) I would feel guilty bringing any child into this world.”
Jennifer didn’t complete her PhD on the disappearing ice sheets – although she hopes to one day return to it.
She is now living in Perthshire with her mother and has found that mountain biking has helped her achieve some peace of mind.
Jennifer says she plans to set up a social enterprise project in Aberfeldy, called Soulful Adventures In Nature (Sain), to help people improve their mental health through outdoor activities.
She accepts that the climate situation will worsen – but has learned not to feel personal guilt for the circumstances.
“I had the sense of hopelessness and powerlessness. But, thankfully I chose to keep fighting to change that, and have a world that I do want to be a part of,” she says.
There is a growing recognition that environmental change affects not just physical but also mental health – although there is still relatively little research into the cognitive impact of it.
In 2021, Bath University lecturer, psychotherapist and researcher Caroline Hickman and her colleagues examined data from 10,000 young people, aged 16 to 25, living in 10 different countries.
About half of those who took part in the survey reported feeling sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless or guilty.
The study, published in Lancet Planetary Health, found that while threats faced in different countries varied – from food insecurity to pollution or flooding – there were similar levels of anxiety.
“Over half think humanity is doomed, 56% worldwide, 51% in the U.K., 73% in the Philippines,” Ms. Hickman says.
“So there’s more closeness in relationship. Being at a distance from it physically doesn’t protect you from the emotional and cognitive impact.”
The article also spotlights student Kyle Downie, 22, who “was an avid climate activist but had to take a break from campaigning due to his mental health. He is now on anti-depressants.” It continues:
His mental health started to worsen in March last year and while eco-anxiety was not the only cause, he believes it was a factor.
“It wasn’t because of eco-anxiety – but I think the eco-anxiety played a big part in being diagnosed with depression,” he says.
“I think that’s probably the case for a lot of people. Just because that feeling of hopelessness is always there, so it leads to depression.”
Worth reading in full.
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The article shows the futility of interventions in the spread of flu-like illness. A far bigger worry for transplant/immune-compromised patients is the resistant bacteria being created through chronic use of unregulated hand sanitizers.
my medic researcher wife is very worried about this. wont use the hand sanitisers or let the kids. says handwashing alone is good enough
Good old soap! (Who’d ‘ve thunk it?)
Agree, I haven’t use the rubbish for months
Hand sanitizer, that is.
Indeed, its not exactly new or novel is it?
They knew full well before they started fire hosing sanitiser about what would happen, this article is from 2018:
“In the early 2000s, hospitals across Australia began installing more hand-sanitizer dispensers in their rooms and hallways for staff, visitors and patients to use. Research showed these alcohol-based disinfectants helped battle staph infections in patients and certain kinds of drug-resistant bacteria. And rates of these infections went down.
But other infections didn’t drop when people started using the sanitizer stations. In fact, certain infections went up.
In particular, enterococcal infections — caused by bacteria that affect the digestive tract, bladder, heart and other parts of the body — started increasing.”
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/08/02/635017716/some-bacteria-are-becoming-more-tolerant-of-hand-sanitizers-study-finds?t=1611846494692&t=1612447906319
The link “fro elsewhere” to the ons site is giving a 404 error.
Looks like the URL was incomplete.
And excellent piece. Links a lot of threads of information on lockdowns and their effects together.
It makes a very strong case for no more lockdowns and why on earth vaccine passports have anything to do with solving the issues outlined here I have no idea. Unless it was never about a virus
“infections acquired in hospitals and care homes, when added together, account for a substantial majority of COVID-19 deaths”
NHS and PHE are really not fit for purpose
Lockdown just slows the gaining of immunity by the wider community that would then shield the more vulnerable. Imperial modelling suggests that lockdown causes more deaths than non-lockdown from covid – let alone the lockdown deaths
Add in schools and universities and you have about 100%. Hospitality has been hung out to dry.
Its been the case over recent years that unless their is a dire need, the last place to go if you want to stay healthy is a hospital. The covid numbers just show how this is even more true for respiratory illnesses.
This is not about a virus, never has been. Its about changing society to allow the resource constrained capitalism to take place under a biosecure fascist totalitarian regime. Many anglosphere countries are well on their way, but there are issues about splits in the US and Europe.
Re. Your second paragraph and the NWO. There’s a good piece on this in yesterdays Off-Guardian:
The New Normal (Phase 2)
https://off-guardian.org/2021/03/09/73943/
Underlying the fact that Covid is a nosocomial infection.
As highlighted on here and by Yeadon et al months ago.
The longer this farce progresses, the more right the Great Barrington Declaration’s proposals appear.
Worth noting that the only hospitals to get their Nosocomial infection rate down to statistical zero were those in Singapore last year, which proceeded on the assumption that Covid is primarily contact transferred through oro-foecal contamination, same as polio or Norovirus.
They went absolutely rabid on proper soap n water handwashing.
It worked – go figure as the USians say.
https://market-ticker.org/cgi-ticker/akcs-www?post=239747
The lesson one can draw is that neither GBD nor the official policy-which, after all, includes shielding, can work well. Shielding properly would need identification, effort and resources, all of which are being misdirected or squandered in a generalist approach. The age structure and vulnerability (ie co-morbities, obesity & diabetes) were known from Italy a year ago. The tragedy is that no lessons were learned then and few now.
Given the well-know BME propensity for diabetes and the significantly worse health of Asian elders, shielding here would mean deliberately breaking up the extended family. This would have to be done by compulsion-and good luck with that.
Although Prof. Whitty acknowledged that infections were slowing before lockdown he insists that opening up after May 17th (my birthday!) is a grave risk. He cannot have been looking at the US states which have reopened and can be compared to (often neighbouring) ones with stringent measures. Doubling down on an error is a very human mistake and it will cost us dear unless we end the obsession with lockdown. As the 2011/14 Influenza Prep. Plan outlined, a generalist approach cannot work. That we knew this is another tragedy and why however disheartening it can be ‘la lutta continua.’.
Does anyone know how I can locate the round up from previous days? It no longer seems to appear on the relevant days update?
Having A Laugh