Amid the growing awareness on social media of climate change, a public health and nursing science graduate student from the University of British Columbia has created a virtual toolkit to recognize and remedy the mental health impacts of the climate crisis.
The digital resource, created by registered nurse Natania Abebe, focuses on people’s experiences of eco-anxiety, eco-paralysis and eco-grief. While they aren’t officially defined as mental illnesses, Abebe said they are natural emotional reactions to the climate crisis that aren’t often addressed through action.
“Eco-paralysis is that overwhelming feeling that you’re so overwhelmed by climate change, that you kind of become disengaged with it,” Abebe said. “Whereas ecological grief is more like the sadness or the mourning you feel with your loss of changing environmental landscapes.”
Abebe released the toolkit in the final weeks of the winter semester. It includes short films and self-reflective questions and was presented to the second-year nursing course Abebe was a teaching assistant for. While the students watched the films in class—which Carleton associate professor and journalist Adrian Harewood narrated—the entire toolkit is available for anyone to access.
Some of the strategies Abebe suggested for alleviating eco-anxiety include connecting with nature and other people. She also recommended finding coping methods like creating art or engaging in other sustainable behaviours for the individual.
“Eco-paralysis is that overwhelming feeling that you’re so overwhelmed by climate change, that you kind of become disengaged with it.”
Raluca Radu and Elizabeth Bailey, the associate professors who helped Abebe with her project, noted several positive reactions to the toolkit from UBC students both in and outside the nursing course.
Bailey said the format of the multimedia toolkit is also a new way for students and faculty to think about presenting their work, especially when calling for social change.
“The amount of uptake in interest in the film and toolkit has been so broad and swift,” she said. “I think it really shows the value of this kind of project, in addition to traditional research methodologies.”
Radu said this year her summer course on the health impacts of climate change saw a full enrolment of 50 students, with 30 more put on the waiting list. Whether attributable to the toolkit’s success or the growing anxieties about climate change, this is the largest group Radu has seen enrolled to date.
Bailey, who teaches another course on stress and strategies to promote well-being, noticed some themes from the toolkit come up in her students’ work.
“Identifying eco-anxiety and eco-grief as stressors that [students] were feeling, but then also talking about ways that activism and connecting with other people to take action on those feelings could be of benefit,” Bailey said.
Radu said the rising online awareness of climate issues may be driving this change in attitudes.
Measuring the effects
Researchers at Simon Fraser University are using social media to monitor the prevalence and effects of climate-related distress. The project was spearheaded by Athabasca University professor Gina Martin and other professors at SFU.
After the release of a climate-related distress monitoring survey last year, the researchers are starting a new phase of their work involving focus groups and platform testing. Martin said the testing phase will take about a year, but the researchers hope to continue the project for many years to aid other researchers, policy-makers and individuals concerned about climate anxiety.
Those who didn’t respond to the initial survey may also be more likely to turn to social media and begin dialogues online, Martin added.
“[Social media] presents a way to automate our findings and get it to the people who need it faster so they can potentially respond,” she said.
According to Martin, the researchers expect to see greater distress on social media in those who live in areas recently experiencing climate-related events.
She added that youth are especially affected by this type of distress, as the quality of their future is unknown due to the impacts of past generations’ environmental footprint.
Abebe said intergenerational climate injustice is part of why she created her toolkit.
“When we think of climate change, it’s not just climate change. It’s also things like massive economic inequality, it’s about racism, it’s about all these other ‘-isms’ that I think a lot of younger people are very much in tune with and aware of,” she said. “[For] a lot of youth, it feels like we’ve inherited systems that we didn’t necessarily create.”
For many people, including the wide range of students who participated in the toolkit’s creation, this was their first time unpacking their emotional response to climate change.
“We’re the ones who are going to face its effects and we’re the ones who are [going to] be responsible for fixing mistakes that we can’t really fix.”
Abebe interviewed Magalee Blumenkrans, a fourth-year student at UBC, who said she is a classic case of eco-paralysis, though it doesn’t affect her day-to-day activities.
“We’re the ones who are going to face its effects and we’re the ones who are [going to] be responsible for fixing mistakes that we can’t really fix,” Blumenkrans said.
She added that the toolkit raised her level of awareness of the effects of climate change on her own mental health.
“For something so broad as climate change, I feel like many people can’t actually feel it,” Blumenkrans said. “Courses like Raluca’s course and toolkits like Natania’s toolkit help to tangibly feel the effects of the crisis that is ongoing but is very insidious in the way that it affects our day-to-day.”
Featured image by Francois Mittins.
