Climate Change and The Young Generations: Their Anxiety Is Real
Climate change is ubiquitous. Yet just as its impacts are felt differently in different areas of the world, they are also felt differently by different populations and subsets of populations. Here in the U.S., younger generations arguably seem more alarmed by the future they face with climate change as well as more motivated to make it a guiding force in their lives.
In coming weeks, The Connecticut Mirror will explore a number of aspects of how young people view climate change: their fears, their activism, their politics, their realities and more.
At 16, Jack Grindley has only the faintest memory of when tropical storm Irene in 2011 and storm Sandy in 2012 decimated his East Haven neighborhood, forcing him and his mother out of their home for nearly two years. But the climate change that likely intensified those storms — he’s well aware of that every day. The house next door remains abandoned. There are still empty lots left from destroyed homes. In the meantime, persistent sunny-day flooding from sea level rise means he never really knows whether he’ll be wading through water to get to school in the morning or home from school in the afternoon. “Or Jack will come home from school and he’ll be like, ‘Seriously, I can’t get to my house unless I walk through the water?’” “My house is gonna go,” Grindley says matter-of-factly.
But instead of turning his climate change reality and what it portends for his future into a source of anxiety, Grindley is using it as a jumping off point for activism with other like-minded young people in the New Haven Climate Movement. And heading into his senior year, he is already focusing on urban planning and sustainability as a career.
Mental health professionals are starting to recognize that anxiety about climate change is a thing, especially among young people. Up until the last few years, the impact of climate change on mental health has mostly existed as a subset or secondary effect of other mental health concerns. And it’s had a more biological focus — in particular, what heat does to the brain. Multiple psychiatric conditions seem to worsen when it’s hot. People are more prone to mental confusion, aggression, violence and suicide. Hospitalizations for things like bipolar disorder and PTSD increase.
Research on climate anxiety or climate distress has started to come into existence, including some specifically on kids. Several mainstream psychiatric and psychological groups and think tanks, including the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry have started to add climate change to their arrays of committees.
For now, the go-to data on kids and climate change is from a 2021 study, Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey. The lead author was Caroline Hickman, a British researcher. Hickman and her team surveyed 10,000 16-25 year-olds in 10 countries, including the United States. Its key findings were that:
“Respondents in all countries were worried about climate change (59% were very or extremely worried and 84% were at least moderately worried). More than 50% reported each of the following emotions: sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty. More than 45% of respondents said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning, and many reported a high number of negative thoughts about climate change (e.g., 75% said that they think the future is frightening and 83% said that they think people have failed to take care of the planet). Respondents rated governmental responses to climate change negatively and reported greater feelings of betrayal than of reassurance. Climate anxiety and distress were correlated with perceived inadequate government response and associated feelings of betrayal.”
U.S. respondents registered one of the lowest rates of concern.
A 2021 study led by Caroline Hickman on climate anxiety in young people. Among its findings as published in the Lancet – U.S. children showed one of the lowest levels of concern among the 10 nations surveyed. Credit: The Lancet
Suzanne Davino, a clinical psychologist who practices in Connecticut and New York, asks her patients about climate anxiety as part of her intake process. “I started having patients who were saying things like, ‘I didn’t feel worthy of eating this much,’” she said. “I started conversing with other psychologists and found that I was not alone. They were also seeing patients who were afraid to eat. Or I also met with patients who didn’t want to have children.”
But what climate activist young people told The Connecticut Mirror over and over — and Davino and other professionals said they hear it too — is frustration and anxiety that older generations have decided climate change is a problem younger people should solve. They frequently say that aside from the pressure it puts on them, by the time they’re old enough to actually have an impact on policies and actions, it will be too late.
Sena Wazer, 20, is a Connecticut native, a 2022 UConn graduate and onetime activist with the Connecticut chapter of the Sunrise Movement. She often dates her environmental interest to a kid’s book she read when she was 5 about a whale that got caught in a fishing net. After crying for days, she said her father said if she didn’t like something, she should do something about it. Which she did, handing out information about whales at a local farmers market where her parents were selling vegetables from their farm.
But a recent statement by Gov. Ned Lamont that “young people” would save us from climate change annoyed her. “I find it really ironic that somebody who’s in a position with all of this power would say that to somebody who’s my age or younger when … they’re sitting in the position that could have a real influence.”
Davino calls it anticipated trauma. “Kids are hearing the ice caps are gonna melt; the sea levels are gonna rise; we’re gonna expect more strange weather events. They’ve already seen these catastrophic events on the news and are expecting more, and that’s a kind of anticipatory anxiety that is unprecedented,” she said.
But climate change is a planet-wide crisis with all-but-intractable geo-political entanglements. No one nation can fix it, never mind one person. The anxiety that reality can induce could result in a hopelessness that dissuades people from doing anything. Yet young people on their own seem to have come up with the exact ways of coping that mental health professionals recommend. The pros say step No. 1 is coming to grips with what’s happening. “We may never get back to square one with climate, so there has to be some degree of acceptance and adaptation involved,” Davino said. One of the healthiest things to do is to get involved and to act — but with a balance, she said, between accepting life as it is and trying to change it. And do it with other people.
