Authors
Panu Pihkala
Publication date
2019/10/30
Publisher
Suomen mielenterveysseura
Description
This first, more extensive Finnish-language report on climate anxiety is based on multidisciplinary re-search and observations made from practical actions taken to alleviate it. Climate anxiety is an aspect of the wider phenomenon of eco-anxiety: it encompasses challenging emotions, experienced to a significant degree, due to environmental issues and the threats they pose. On a wider scale, both eco-anxiety and climate anxiety are components of a phenomenon, in which the state of the world (ie the so-called macro social factors) impacts our mental health. Climate anxiety can be a problem if it is so intense that a person may come paralysed, but climate anx-iety is not primarily a disease. Instead it is an understandable reaction to the magnitude of the envi-ronmental problems that surround us. Climate anxiety can often be an important resource as well, but this entails that a person finds, along with others, a) enough time and space to deal with their emotions and b) enough constructive activity to help mitigate climate change. The report places climate anxiety as one of the health effects of climate change (Chapter 2). Two cen-tral psychological challenges and tasks (Chapter 3) are a) adjusting to changing circumstances, ie re-maining functional, and b) accepting one’s own ethical responsibility and keeping a healthy perspec-tive, ie living with ambivalence. The report publishes, for the first time in Finnish, a review of the various symptoms of climate anxiety, with reference to international studies (Chapter 4). The symp-toms can be placed on a scale of the mildest to the most severe and they can also manifest as psy-chophysical symptoms. What …
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