Sarah Newman is the Founder and Executive Director of the Climate Mental Health Network, a collaborative of mental health community advocates who are focused on changing our nation’s conversation and its response around climate crisis emotions. Prior to launching CMHN in 2021, Newman worked in the impact media space for many years, including a stint at Participant Media. During her time in the industry, Sarah worked on campaigns for films such as Contagion, Food, Inc., The Cove, and Heather Booth: Changing the World.
As a part of our Health Theme week, Sarah joins us to shed light on a global mental health crisis, which is exacerbated by the climate crisis.
As an expert in this field, can you share an overview of how climate change is contributing to the growing mental health crisis worldwide?
The mental health impacts of climate change are prevalent due to both direct experiences (extreme weather such as hurricanes or wildfires) and indirect experiences (learning about it in the news or on social media). The range of climate emotions people can experience are very real, and can include grief, fear, anger, anxiety, or sadness. Climate Mental Health Network’s climate emotions wheel, which we created with Panu Pihkala based on his research is a great tool to begin exploring one’s climate emotions.
According to a journal in the Lancet, 75% of youth worldwide are saying the future is frightening because of climate change.
Rhea Goswami, a college student and a Gen Z advisor at the Climate Mental Health Network explains,
“Every day when I go outside and remark that this weather feels different compared to last year, or hear my grandparents tell us that the heat is becoming unbearable in India, I feel grief for what our climate used to be and the climate that was stolen from the future generation.”
Can you discuss the psychological effects of living through the current climate crisis?
Living through extreme weather events can have a significant mental health impact, most specifically trauma and PTSD. It is also consequential because we are now seeing prolonged seasons of extreme weather, rather than “once in a lifetime events.” There’s now a wildfire season for a significant portion of the year in the United States, for example. In fact, the “psychological trauma caused by climate-driven disasters exceeds those of physical injury by a ratio of 40 to one”, according to research by Climate Cares. These types of events further exacerbate inequalities amongst vulnerable populations worldwide, which in turn negatively impacts their mental wellbeing.
Young people worldwide are grappling with a deep sense of betrayal due to their governments' failure to take meaningful action on climate change.
From the things you have seen through you and your partners' work, can you touch on the importance of mental health being a part of the climate change discourse?
Every issue can be examined through the lens of climate change, whether it’s women’s rights, education, or economics. Therefore, we must include the additional lens of mental health when examining how the climate crisis is impacting each of us as individuals, our families, communities and the world. The climate crisis is a collective experience and the emotions we are feeling are a normal, valid response. These emotions reflect the pain and loss we are experiencing because of climate change–the loss of people, nature, communities, social structures, cultural heritages, and more.
We cannot solve the climate crisis without addressing the mental health impacts. The challenge and opportunity is to help people develop the skills needed to navigate these complex emotions. We need to equip people to support their community’s wellbeing, resilience and mental capacity to take meaningful action.
As Rhea says, “amidst this grief, I find hope and solace by looking at the incredible work done by my friends, activists, and scientists.”
Addressing climate emotions IS a form of climate action. Doing so helps individuals, families and communities become emotionally resilient, encourages meaningful action, strengthens the efficacy of all climate sectors, and builds a culture not based on fear or despair, but one of what ecophilosopher Joanna Macy calls "active hope."
Using fear, guilt, shame or divisiveness to spur climate action won’t work: it makes people feel scared, angry, helpless and most importantly, hopeless. Joy and gratitude are essential to experience in our lives because there’s so much beauty despite the devastation that our planet is currently facing.
How can health professionals and corporations be better equipped to address the mental health impacts of climate change?
The Health Action Alliance has these great sheets for employees and employers about how to address climate emotions in the workplace. My organization, the Climate Mental Health Network, has led many workplace workshops. Based on those experiences and our data from them, we know that people are struggling both personally and professionally with climate emotions, which can affect their workplace performance. Additionally, research shows that young people prefer to work at companies that are actively addressing climate change. Also, while new research shows that people don’t want companies taking public stances on issues, the two issues that were an exception were climate change and mental health.
For the sake of our overall wellbeing, we must work collectively to address the climate crisis because we are all in this together and need one another now more than ever.