This climate trauma thing is great. You have people yammering about other people having mental health issues from a tiny increase in the Earth’s average temperature, something that has happened many many times during the Holocene, which causes other people to think they’re mentally ill
‘Ecological grief’: Greenland residents traumatised by climate emergency
The climate crisis is causing unprecedented levels of stress and anxiety to people in Greenland who are struggling to reconcile the traumatic impact of global heating with their traditional way of life.
The first ever national survey examining the human impact of the climate emergency, revealed in the Guardian on Monday, shows that more than 90% of islanders interviewed fully accept that the climate crisis is happening, with a further 76% claiming to have personally experienced global heating in their daily lives, from coping with dangerous sea ice journeys to having sled dogs euthanised for economic reasons tied to shorter winters.
None of this proves anthropogenic causation. Oh, and it’s not like that “if the Greenland ice sheet goes on melting at this extraordinary rate, then within 12,500 years HALF of it will be gone.” Darned science
Scattered across 17 small towns and approximately 60 villages, all situated on a narrow coastal strip, Greenland’s residents have often been overlooked by data science. The island faces some of the most acute social issues in the world with high levels of alcoholism and historically disproportionate rates of suicide.
According to its lead author, Kelton Minor, the survey finally gives Greenland’s most remote and inaccessible communities a voice on the climate crisis.
Did they just try and link those issues to a tiny increase in “carbon pollution”?
For mental health professionals who specialise in the polar region, the latest survey findings from Greenland will present another red flag for the Arctic’s vulnerable Inuit communities. According to Courtney Howard, the board president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, who lives and works in the Arctic, the intersection between the climate emergency and mental and physical health will become one of the world’s major issues.
Howard said: “Temperature change is magnified in circumpolar regions. There is no question Arctic people are now showing symptoms of anxiety, ‘ecological grief’ and even post-traumatic stress related to the effects of climate change.
“We are challenging the medical profession to acknowledge the world we are inheriting. Schools and universities aren’t considering how climate change will affect people, from a medical or a psychological perspective, so we are not training a new generation of medical professionals to help people in a fast-changing planet and this is intolerable. We are moving too slowly on this.â€
We can solve this with a tax, though.
