( Breitbart )
Climate change is a “significant mental health,” warn alarmists, and “the psychological well-being of populations worldwide is increasingly at risk.”
Global warming is “reshaping the physical world” and is also “creating significant mental health challenges that threaten the well-being of millions globally, write Urveez Kakalia and Krupa Abraham in Longevity.
People who experience climate change-induced extreme weather events like hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and droughts “can suffer from anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),” they contend.
Vulnerable populations are especially at risk, the authors argue, citing a global survey that found that “84% of young people aged 16 to 25 expressed anxiety about climate change, with nearly half reporting that it negatively affected their daily lives.”
The writers seem not to notice the irony of what they are writing. It is not the phenomenon of climate change but rather climate change alarmism, or climate derangement syndrome, that provokes mental health issues, as other publications have begun to acknowledge.
Young people who lack the critical capabilities to question and resist bombardment from messages of climate peril buy into doomsday scenarios and suffer acutely as a result.
When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, tells young people that “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,” she sparks terror among the young that has nothing to do with global warming and everything to do with irresponsible scare-mongering.
Less than a year ago, former Vice-President Al Gore insisted that there is a mental health crisis around the world because “young people look at the fact that we are not yet solving the climate crisis or dealing with some of the other challenges.”
Gore was right about the symptoms but wrong in his diagnosis of the causes of the crisis, among which he is a part.
In 2019, the Daily Telegraph reported on an epidemic of “eco-anxiety” among the children who are being treated for an overwhelming terror of “environmental doom” as climate alarmists spread fears of an impending climate disaster.
“Protests by groups such as Extinction Rebellion, the recent fires in the Amazon and apocalyptic warnings by the teenage activist Greta Thunberg have prompted a ‘tsunami’ of young people seeking help,” the Telegraph’s science correspondent reported at the time.
“A lot of parents are coming into therapy asking for help with the children and it has escalated a lot this summer,” said psychotherapist Caroline Hickman of the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA).
“The symptoms are the same [as clinical anxiety], the feelings are the same, but the cause is different,” she said. “The fear is of environmental doom — that we’re all going to die.”
A spike in psychological trauma over global warming should come as no surprise, since climate alarmists have been intentionally amping up the rhetoric over a looming environmental apocalypse.
As Breitbart News has reported, activists have studied people’s emotional response to climate expressions and purposefully selected the terminology that elicits the strongest reaction.
In July 2018, the Berkeley City Council in California issued a resolution declaring a worldwide “climate emergency,” calling it “the greatest crisis in history” after evoking memories of World War II.
The following month, Salon magazine announced it is time to “start panicking” over climate change.
“It is time for us to panic about global warming,” wrote Salon contributor Matthew Rozsa. “Indeed, a proper state of panic is long overdue.”
The Guardian newspaper famously updated its official in-house style guide to intensify its climate change rhetoric.
“Instead of ‘climate change’ the preferred terms are ‘climate emergency, crisis or breakdown’ and ‘global heating’ is favoured over ‘global warming,’ although the original terms are not banned,” the Guardian stated.
“The phrase ‘climate change,’ for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity,” said Katharine Viner, the Guardian’s editor-in-chief and a firm believer in the impending climate apocalypse.
“Increasingly, climate scientists and organisations from the UN to the Met Office are changing their terminology, and using stronger language to describe the situation we’re in,” she said.
The Climate Psychology Alliance said psychiatric drugs have been administered to some children complaining of eco-anxiety. The group is now pushing for official recognition of eco-anxiety as a psychological phenomenon.
Ms. Hickman, however, said that parents should learn to use gentler language in talking to their children about global warming.
“What you don’t want is that child to collapse in a well of depression saying ‘what’s the point in going to university,’ or ‘what’s the point of doing my exams,’ which I have heard children say,” Hickman stated.
Last summer, the Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley published an op-ed showing how climate alarmists’ overwrought accounts of hot summer weather are “fueling mental derangements.”
It is not the weather itself, but the hyperbolic way it is reported that spreads panic, Finley wrote, since in the past “heat waves were treated as a normal part of summer,” whereas now they are treated as harbingers of an impending climate apocalypse.
Knowingly or not, mainstream media have been complicit in spreading “climate hypochondria,” she argued, which simply does not match the reality of what is happening to the weather and the threats this may or may not pose.
“It isn’t difficult to notice that today’s snowflakes consider hot weather aberrant, similar to how they perceive normal feelings such as anxiety or sadness,” Finley stated. “But there’s nothing normal about climate anxiety, despite the left’s claims to the contrary.”
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