Thread by @compatibilism

🌏🌍🌎🔥🧠 On #WorldMentalHealthDay, I'm thinking about how climate change and environmental degradation act on our mental, spiritual, emotional, and behavioral health.

It should come as no surprise that a rapidly changing environment changes us, too. 👇👇

In the face of global climate change, there are folks out there who believe their children have no future. Some of us can't bring ourselves to have children in the first place because of this environmental chaos.

You might be one of these people. (I might be!)

We have words for these feelings: ecoanxiety, climate grief, environmental melancholia, solastalgia, pre-traumatic stress disorder.

I know high-schoolers who are preparing for their future with an urgency and uncanny resignation they usually reserve for active-shooter drills.

The mental-health costs of climate change alone are staggering.

But the really frightening thing, to me, is how a rapidly changing Nature reaches back and physically shakes us—how the environment can directly intervene in our behavior and decision-making and brain health.

This is about more than climate change, but that's the prism that focuses these effects.

Rising temperatures cause spikes in everything from aggravated assault to domestic violence to civil unrest.

CO2 levels and heat waves directly impede problem-solving and cognition.

Thawing permafrost alters identity.

You don’t need to go to war to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder: Those freak hurricanes will do the trick.

Air pollution offers one of the most compelling explanations for rising rates of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.

The point is: A rapidly changing world changes us from the inside out.

Consider the case of mountaintop-removal mining, where whole landscapes are bulldozed for coal extraction. In nearby towns, major depressive symptomology skyrockets: grist.org/climate-energy…

It's a lot.

But: I think coming to terms with the mental health and neurological effects of a changing world can help us grasp the scope and scale of something as big and unwieldy as the climate crisis.

Forget 50-year predictions. Climate change is here, now, changing us.

Thanks to contemporary neuroscience, we know the magic of the mind to arise from an unassuming wrinkly organ tucked away beneath a few millimeters of skin, skull, and spidery protective tissues.

The brain and mind are physical stuff—they're subject to the whims of a wild planet.

I don't have an uplifting note, really. I have solidarity and heartbreak and resources from the good folks at places like @GoodGriefNetwk and @EcoAnxiousCa—and from people like @reneelertzman, @AuthorDavenport, and @dan_psyd, who have been thinking about these effects for years.

The other point is: It's okay for this stuff to feel personal. (It is.)

And... if any of this sounds like you, I'm collecting stories for a big project about these effects and the brain science behind it all.

You're welcome to share your experience 👇 claytonaldern.typeform.com/to/g97vAj