During Yellowknife’s first Fridays For Future climate change march last fall, Dr. Courtney Howard spoke about her experience with a condition called eco-anxiety to “the most Yellowknifers I’ve seen in one spot.”

She asked the young crowd — an estimated 1,000 people — to raise their hands if they also find themselves worried about climate change, and she watched “all these little hands go up.”

Every day, young people are immersed in unrelenting and alarming climate change information, particularly on social media, which has contributed to the new mental health phenomenon. Eco-anxiety leads to intense feelings of stress, fear and grief in reaction to climate change.

In response, some countries are introducing more targeted climate curricula. But that movement is slow to arrive in Canada.

“I first became aware of eco-anxiety when it happened to me,” says Howard, an emergency doctor in the Northwest Territories. She began dealing with crippling anxiety after educating herself about the state of our planet in 2012.

“I finished reading Bill McKibben’s ‘Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math’ in the fetal position, curled up around my eight-month-old daughter, thinking climate change is going to change her life.”

Today she has transformed that fear into action, speaking out about her experience with eco-anxiety and advocating for the expansion of climate education.

Eco-anxiety was first defined in 2017 by the American Psychological Association as “a chronic fear of environmental doom.” The condition can be debilitating, emotionally exhausting and lead to depression, loneliness, lethargy and feelings of helplessness. “I didn’t know anyone else feeling this way and was incredibly lonely,” says Howard. “It impacted my daily function a lot.”

Eco-anxiety presents itself differently from other forms of anxiety, says Niki Harre, a psychology professor at the University of Auckland. It is less individual; instead, it is a fear for the collective future.

The phenomenon is relatively new, and the term eco-anxiety is not yet commonplace, says Harre, even among people who are experiencing it. While there is no clinical diagnosis, the trend is definitely becoming more and more clear, and young people are most at risk.

Rachael Buchwald, a 20-year-old student at the University of Manitoba, says her eco-anxiety has increased in the last year. She did study climate change when she was younger but has only recently begun to feel “just how overwhelming of an issue climate change really is.”

Buchwald describes completing a Grade 5 project on ecological sustainability as just another part of the curriculum.

“I don’t think I really understood what it all meant,” she said, but she believes today’s younger children are immersed in an environment where they are told their future is uncertain. They grow up hearing about natural disasters and some even see that devastation first hand.

That was the case in Vernon, B.C., says Julia Payson, executive director of the local Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) branch. Wildfires surrounded the town in 2018, and residents were told to stay indoors for a week because of the smoke. The CMHA’s crisis line lit up.

It received calls from individuals who felt socially isolated, first responders were reporting PTSD, and many said they felt powerless and stressed. Young people were especially worried. Payson remembers her own terrified children asking: “What’s happening? How close are the fires? Why is the sky orange?”

“A lot of parents didn’t know how to explain the fires to their kids,” says Payson. The Vernon CMHA created a toolkit to support parents whose children were dealing with eco-anxiety. However, Canadian curricula have little to offer teachers whose students express the same concerns.

People who witness the effects of climate change up close, such as those in Vernon, face more risk of experiencing eco-anxiety. In Nunavut, elders in the community are also expressing eco-anxiety, says Howard, as they have seen the land and hunting practices change in their lifetimes.

Others experiencing more general eco-anxiety may not see the imminent risk of climate change first hand, but they often are following ecological crises closely on social media.

Today, climate change is framed as the biggest threat to biodiversity, economic growth, global health and even the human species itself. Many experts on eco-anxiety compare it with the nuclear threat for previous generations. Young people in Canada were too often left out of the nuclear conversation.

“When parents weren’t levelling with their children about the nuclear crisis, their kids lost trust in them,” says Howard. This left a generation of young people feeling unsafe, confused and generated much stress.

Unlike the nuclear threat, however, climate change is visible daily, at least on phones and televisions. A never-ending news cycle of wildfires, flooding, heat waves and cyclones makes climate change appear more imminent than ever before for many young people.

Sarah Rundle, a Grade 11 student at Malvern Collegiate Institute in Toronto, is the president of her school’s eco club. “There has been more of a push to get involved in the fight against climate change this year than ever before,” she says.

Rundle says students are more fearful this year. In weekly club meetings, they talk about these concerns, including whether they will be able to have children and what jobs will be available for them.

To address this type of concern, countries such as New Zealand and Italy are introducing climate change curriculums, which try to address eco-anxiety. The idea is to emphasize the science behind climate change, while presenting strategies to better manage eco-anxiety.

In New Zealand, middle-school students are now being taught climate science, current international responses, local implications and how to join climate change movements. They are also encouraged to keep a “feelings thermometer” to track their emotions in a curriculum developed in collaboration with scientists and psychologists.

“The curriculum includes important tools for managing eco-anxiety,” says Jackie Feather, a psychologist and senior lecturer at the Auckland University of Technology. “When students understand the science behind climate change it helps ease their anxiety,” she says.

Mental health tools in the new curriculum encourage students to acknowledge and cope with difficult emotions around climate change, and a new Wellbeing Guide teaches mindfulness, to “check in with your values” and be grateful.

Meanwhile in Canada, climate education is widely seen as lacking and inconsistent. A study on secondary school curriculums last year found the majority of students were not being taught about the scientific consensus that humans are causing climate change. Many textbooks are outdated and do not reflect the current scientific data. For instance, Manitoba’s climate curriculum was published in 2001.

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“I’m part of a generation that didn’t really learn a lot about climate change in school,” says Talia Smith, who graduated from Oak Park High School in Winnipeg in 2014.

Even Rundle, who is a current high school student, says “I only really started learning about climate change when I was 14, which I think is far too late.”

The new climate change curricula being developed also focus on collective activism and individual lifestyle changes in response to eco-anxiety. As Yellowknife’s Courtney Howard has experienced first hand, “action feels better than anxiety.”

This is also why students at Malvern Collegiate have been organizing their own beach clean-ups, fundraising for koalas in the Australian bushfires and tracking the school’s waste management. As well, Sarah Rundle has given up meat this year, is avoiding fast fashion, limiting her water and electricity use and is trying to use public transit more often.

Joining the fight against climate change has helped some students feel better about the future, but others say the task feels daunting.

“It can feel very overwhelming and exhausting to try and tackle climate change as just one person facing a global problem,” says Winnipeg’s Smith.

Likewise, Buchwald says she was excited when her family began composting. But then she realized her neighbours were not, and that her university definitely wasn’t and the restaurant she works at combines recycled bottles with garbage at the end of each night. This is an “overwhelming feeling,” she says.

Such feelings of helplessness are why experts warn against letting anxiety lead to burnout. When Howard first got involved in climate activism, she says, “I was completely driven by anxiety instead of strategy.” Today, she says “if you want to make change, you have to be quite centred in your emotions.”

Howard’s involvement in the climate movement helped her feel less alone and find people in her community who were experiencing the same feelings of eco-anxiety.

Feather emphasizes that when it comes to anxiety, “it’s what you do with that anxiety that is important.”

“Anxiety is not necessarily a bad thing; it is a natural reaction to a threat,” says Feather. Eco-anxiety is therefore a rational response, not something to suppress or ignore.

Payson, of the Canadian Mental Health Association, says “stress can be a good motivator but if we maintain it for too long, it turns into distress and starts to impair us.”

When she works with individuals experiencing eco-anxiety, she emphasizes “that we have to take care of ourselves and we have to find ways to practise self-compassion.”

Another important tool for managing eco-anxiety is ensuring correct resources are used, which means better media literacy for young people immersed in social media.

With little formal climate education in Canada, many young people instead rely on their own research to inform their opinions, the majority of which comes from social media.

This can be a great tool for young people to follow what is happening globally, like the fires in Australia, but it can also spread false information.

Exaggerated, overly dramatic or inaccurate news spreads quickly on social media and can have harmful impacts on people’s mental health. Headlines claiming there are “only five years left to save the planet” can be especially terrifying to children. Buchwald says the children she babysits often show her alarmist and unverifiable news on Instagram.

Howard says education in Canada needs “to respect our children enough to be honest with them about the challenges we are facing.”

Natasha Comeau is a Fellow in Global Journalism at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. She holds a Master of Global Affairs from the Munk School

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