Climate change and the young generations: Their anxiety is real

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.

“He could wake up in the morning, look out of his window and see that the water’s up to the edge of the deck,” said his mother, Michelle Morgan, noting that she has to park her car up the hill during heavy rains or full-moon high tides. “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 at New Haven’s Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School, he is already focusing on urban planning and sustainability as a career — and spent part of this summer in the Netherlands studying how that nation has battled rising seas.

Mental health professionals are starting to recognize that anxiety about climate change is a thing, especially among young people. And without knowing it, Grindley is doing exactly what a therapist might have suggested he do to deal with it: get out there and do something about it.

“It’s scary,” Grindley said of climate change. “It’s a part of the world now. And it’s not really something that I should really—” he paused. “Well, of course, I should worry about it, but not overly stress about, because stressing won’t make things better; doing will make things better.”

A developing field

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 Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry have started to add climate change to their arrays of committees. The Climate Psychiatry Alliance and Climate Psychology Alliance of North America have formed.

Joshua Wortzel, a psychiatrist who will be joining Connecticut’s Institute of Living and the faculty at Yale, is among the mental health professionals now trying to understand the mental health impacts of climate change.

Wortzel is doing his own research on climate, heat and mental health in kids. Some of it is physical, because kids have less ability to cool than adults do.

“The bottom line lesson is that temperature seems to be relevant for mental health, and kids seem to be affected,” he said.

But quite a bit is not physical. “I think that, in general, a lot of kids are distressed about the state of the world, and climate change is one of them,” he said. “It’s not the primary issue that brings them in, but it’s a contributing issue.”

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.

Laelia Benoit, a French child and adolescent psychiatrist now with the Yale Child Study Center, has conducted research on multiple fronts on climate anxiety among young people, some of which has focused on 7- to 18-year olds in the general population in the U.S., France and Brazil.

Among her findings after talking with kids and their parents separately was that kids would say their parents were not interested in climate action even when they had taken actions such as buying an electric vehicle. She said adults don’t want to trigger climate anxiety.

“So they don’t talk about what they’re doing,” she said. “And they are missing a point here because their kids just don’t understand that their parents are trying to do something.”

Wortzel has found another communication breakdown.

“We’ve been coming to realize that if you don’t ask certain things, you’re not going to hear about it,” he said. “I think that it’s been very interesting talking to different patients about their climate distress and asking, ‘Have you talked about this at all with your therapist?’ And they say, ‘No, it’s never come up.’”

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.

“Even if it sounds kind of positive, it’s also putting a lot of burden on their shoulders,” Benoit said. “It’s a little bit saying like, ‘Oh, they’re better than us, so we can continue doing our selfish lives, and they are going to take care of it.’”

Sena Wazer, 20, is a Connecticut native, a 2022 UConn graduate and onetime activist with the Connecticut chapter of the Sunrise Movement. She’s now returning to the state to attend graduate school related to climate change after working as a regional organizer for Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project.

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.

Her climate activism was spurred by dire predictions of what the world might be like as soon as 2030 in a report by the International Panel on Climate Change.

“It scared me, to be honest,” she said. “How old will I be? How old will my sister be in 2030? I’ll be 26 and she’ll be 24, and that was really scary. We’re really just gonna still be starting our adult lives.”

She said climate change felt personal and overwhelming, but “the only choice I have is to fight this issue.”

But a recent statement by Gov. Ned Lamont that “young people” would save us from climate change annoyed her.

“Yes, we are going to fight this with everything that we have in us, but we also need people who are actually in power to do something about it,” she said, noting that she’s heard this kind of thing since before she could even vote, never mind run for office. “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.”

Martha Laramore-Josey, who grew up in an outdoorsy family in Ann Arbor, Mich., is heading into her senior year at Barnard College, studying environmental neuroscience and climate psychology. She spent two summers in Yale’s summer environmental program, during which she interned with Save the Sound. With a major in psychology and a minor in environment and sustainability, her interest is the intersection between climate and mental health.

They love to say … our generation is going to change things without realizing that that’s a lot of pressure to be putting on us.

Martha Laramore-Josey, Barnard College Senior

“It kind of sounds maybe dramatic, but in high school I was like, ‘Am I even gonna want to have kids if the climate crisis is getting super bad?” she said. She’s frustrated by older generations in government that focus on climate change from an economic perspective. When asked if her generation is getting the problem dumped on them, her response is “definitely.” The “hope” for her generation from older people also can be a destructive force, she said.

“They love to say there’s so much hope for our generation, and they hope that our generation is going to change things without realizing that that’s a lot of pressure to be putting on us,” she said. “It’s frustrating, definitely, for the older generation to be ‘This is you guys; you’re gonna fix everything.’”

“We’re not really going to be able to make a lot of change until we’re a little bit older, which I think is also frustrating, because a lot of us have a lot of good ideas of things we would like to change now and that we need to change now if we have any hope of combating the crisis.”

Wortzel said a lot of the anxiety about climate change comes from whether people trust their leaders to do something.

“If you don’t trust your government and adults to do things, that’s very distressing,” he said. “You feel like you’re, as a kid, not in the driver’s seat, because you can’t be. But the person who’s in the driver’s seat is driving you into a wall. It’s scary.”

Deconstructing climate anxiety

Climate anxiety, climate distress, eco-anxiety, whatever you want to call it, Wortzel likes to split it into three buckets. There are acute traumas, something like a climate-exacerbated hurricane or wildfire that results in catastrophic destruction. There are chronic traumas, such as repeated flooding from extreme rains or prolonged repetitive heat waves. Then there’s vicarious trauma.

“You see what’s going on in the world. And you extrapolate, ‘Gosh, could that happen to me?’ And what that does to a kid,” he said.

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, really,” she said.

But it’s not a mental illness, Wortzel emphasizes.

“It’s not something to treat away,” he said. Instead, it’s a mental health issue, the kind he might see in kids with anxieties around bullying or their parents breaking up.

“What we are going to do is say, ‘Gosh, you’re really struggling with a lot of distress around climate change; how can we support you so that we convert some of what just feels like overwhelming distress and anxiety into something that’s more constructive, or something that feels like it’s not overwhelming you?’”

Wortzel, with his partner Lena Champlin and Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, have even written a children’s book, Coco’s Fire: Changing Climate Anxiety into Climate Action, to help caregivers talk to very young kids about climate change. They’re often worried about animals and pets, he said, while older kids worry about the safety of their families and the implications for their futures.

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.

Coping with climate anxiety

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.

“Actually what is going to really help you is more group support,” Benoit said, citing other research she has done. And she isn’t just referring to support within the mental health field. “It could also be peer support; an advocacy group; and just people coming together so that they are validated through the experience of others. They’re just like, ‘I’m not crazy. It’s not just me. It’s happening to everyone around me.’ And so that’s super empowering.”

She also points out the simple practicality of working in group — doing more on a bigger scale.

“What we’ve been seeing is action, and action-focused coping can be a very powerful mechanism for dealing with climate distress,” Wortzel said. “If you feel like you’re doing something, especially if you’re engaging in community to do it, that that could be powerful.”

Laramore-Josey said she tries to learn as much as she can and talk about it as much as she can with her friends and family.

“I feel very lucky that I have a very wide support system that is also just as concerned as I am about the climate,” she said. “It’s been really helpful for me to have conversations with my friends where I’m like, ‘Guys, what are we gonna do? How are you guys feeling about this?’ And even if none of us could really have any answers, I feel like it’s nice to just talk about it and verbalize how we’re feeling.”

Her practical approach is exactly what the experts recommend: do as much as she can, including the little things that may not have much of an impact on the overall climate problem but can have a big impact on her mental state.

For Wazer, “Especially at the beginning, there were a lot of days where I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is horrible,” she said. “I was in a state of constant fear, really. And I was very, very afraid of what it looked like.” But she felt her choice was do the work or give up. 

“If I give up, it feels like I’m giving up on my life. And so a lot of times, the way that I think about it is that by fighting climate change, I’m also fighting for the life that I want, and I’m fighting for a livable planet; for people to have safety,” she said. “But there are days when it doesn’t work.”

It’s also just inspiring … to know that there’s so many people my age who are also still trying to help out and do something.

Manxi Han, New Haven Climate Movement

Rosie Hampson, who has worked with the New Haven Climate Movement for a few years and just graduated from high school, admits she has those hopeless days.

“Climate anxiety; feeling like there’s nothing we can do and feeling like I had to do something that was huge, but also not knowing what I could do. So I definitely have those days sometimes,” she said.

She said she’s not sure if it’s the best thing to do, but she’ll just tune out national and international news for a bit. “Sometimes paying attention to all that is just too overwhelming and it gets me caught in that sort of spiral of helplessness,” she said.

What keeps her going is knowing that if she doesn’t do something, it will make her anxiety worse. It’s rewarding when her group scores a victory or people come together to get something done.

“And I think definitely having the chance to talk, especially in meetings with New Haven Climate Movement, where we can all talk about things and connect in that way — it’s really helpful to me.”

The same goes for Manxi Han, also with the New Haven Climate Movement and heading into her junior year of high school. “It definitely does help,” she said of having a group effort and peers who also admit to feeling very frightened and pessimistic sometimes.

“It’s also just inspiring … to know that there’s so many people my age who are also still trying to help out and do something.”