Got Climate Insanity? There Are People Who Can Help You With That Or Something

What they will help you with is essentially reinforcing being driving bonkers by doomsday cult dogma

Got Climate Anxiety? These People Are Doing Something About It.

After Britt Wray married in 2017, she and her husband began discussing whether they were going to have children. The conversation quickly turned to climate change and to the planet those children might inherit.

“It was very, very heavy,” said Wray, now a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “I wasn’t expecting it.” She said she became sad and stressed, crying when she read new climate reports or heard activists speak.

Jennifer Atkinson, an associate professor of environmental humanities at the University of Washington, Bothell, became depressed after students told her they could not sleep because they feared social collapse or mass extinction.

There are different terms for what the two women experienced, including eco-anxiety and climate grief, and Wray calls it eco-distress.

“It’s not just anxiety that shows up when we’re waking up to the climate crisis,” she said. “It’s dread; it’s grief; it’s fear.”

Dr. Lise Van Susteren, a psychiatrist based in Washington, D.C., and co-founder of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, an organization building a directory of climate-aware therapists, said she had “absolutely” seen a surge in patients seeking help with climate anxiety in recent years.

But as the prevalence of climate anxiety has grown, so has the number of people working to alleviate it, both for themselves and those around them.

Wray, for example, who holds a doctorate in science communication, began reading everything she could about anxiety and climate change, eventually shifting her own research to focus on it entirely. She shares her findings and coping techniques in a weekly newsletter, Gen Dread, with more than 2,000 subscribers. In the spring of 2022, she plans to publish a book on the topic.

“My overall goal is to help people feel less alone,” Wray said. “We need to restore ourselves so we don’t burn out and know how to be in this crisis for the long haul that it is.”

I have a recommendation. You’ll probably guess it easily. These people should simply practice what they preach. Give up their use of fossil fuels and make their lives carbon neutral.

For many Americans, counseling for climate distress is relatively accessible. In some communities, however, especially in less wealthy countries, it may seem more like a rare privilege.

And now they drag in “privilege.”

Regarding the white and affluent, who most likely will not feel climate change’s worst effects, Kritee said it was crucial they confront their grief, too. In doing so, she said, they can begin to contemplate questions like, “If I am hurting so much, what is happening to people who are less privileged?”

I’m seriously having to pick and choose from a wide variety of nutbaggery in this long NY Times piece.

“What’s really important is we start normalizing this,” Wray said. “Not only to help people who are dealing with this very reasonable distress, but also because allowing those transformations to happen is hugely energizing for actionable climate movement.”

Start normalizing stupid people making themselves wonkers by joining a cult? No, thanks.