In a year filled with despair, metal and hard rock acts helped us get through 2020 with stellar music. Here are the top albums of the year. Wing Diver Inferno Weapon Farming Guide - Earth Defense Force 4.1 The Shadow of New Despair - Duration: 7:19. ALTON PLAYS 15,960 views.

Greta Thunberg at 2018 TED Talk on her climate worry: If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before? Why were there no restrictions? Why wasn't it made illegal? To me, that did not add up. It was too unreal. So when I was 11, I became ill. I fell into depression, I stopped talking, and I stopped eating. In two months, I lost about 10 kilos of weight. Later on, I was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, OCD and selective mutism. That basically means I only speak when I think it's necessary - now is one of those moments.' ..

'I think my anxiety just reached a peak,' Ruttan Walker continued. It felt like there was nowhere to go, and although she had spoken to her primary care doctor about anxiety, she hadn't sought help with her mental health. Suddenly, she was contemplating self-harm. 'Though I don't think I would have hurt myself, I didn't know how to live with the fear of.. the apocalypse, I guess? My son was home with me and I had to call my friend over to watch him because I couldn't even look at him without breaking down,' Ruttan Walker said. She eventually checked herself into an overnight mental health facility..

Maisy Rohrer, a 22-year-old developmental researcher at New York University, has been struggling to cope with climate change for years. 'I guess the despair started when I was 18, and I began learning about how much the earth was changing, and I'd have full-blown panic attacks about the arctic sea ice melting, and the polar bears starving, and I'd call my mom telling her life was pointless,' she said. She believed at the time that the human race 'should be wiped out.'I became very suicidal, and a large part of my justification for feeling like I'd be better off dead was that humans are hurting the Earth so much, and I as one person [couldn't] make enough of a positive impact so it would be better if I were not around to cause any more damage,' Rohrer said.

By Mike Pearl; illustrated by Annie Zhao

Superliminal double-album soundtrack for mac. In the summer of 2015—the warmest year on record at the time—it was the literal heat that got to Meg Ruttan Walker, a 37-year-old former teacher in Kitchener, Ontario. “Summers have been stressful to me since having my son,” said Ruttan Walker, who is now an environmental activist. “It’s hard to enjoy a season that’s a constant reminder that the world is getting warmer.”

“I think my anxiety just reached a peak,” Ruttan Walker continued. It felt like there was nowhere to go, and although she had spoken to her primary care doctor about anxiety, she hadn’t sought help with her mental health. Suddenly, she was contemplating self-harm. “Though I don’t think I would have hurt myself, I didn’t know how to live with the fear of… the apocalypse, I guess? My son was home with me and I had to call my friend over to watch him because I couldn’t even look at him without breaking down,” Ruttan Walker said. She eventually checked herself into an overnight mental health facility.

Her case is extreme, but many people are suffering from what could be called “climate despair,” a sense that climate change is an unstoppable force that will render humanity extinct and renders life in the meantime futile. As David Wallace-Wells noted in his 2019 bestseller The Uninhabitable Earth, “For most who perceive an already unfolding climate crisis and intuit a more complete metamorphosis of the world to come, the vision is a bleak one, often pieced together from perennial eschatological imagery inherited from existing apocalyptic texts like the Book of Revelation, the inescapable sourcebook for Western anxiety about the end of the world.”

“Climate despair” has been a phrase used at least as far back as Eric Pooley’s 2010 book, The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth, but it’s been in wide circulation for perhaps as little as two years. In more progressive Sweden, the term klimatångest has been popular since at least 2011 (the year a Wikipedia article with that name was created). In The Uninhabitable Earth, Wallace-Wells notes that the philosopher Wendy Lynne Lee calls this phenomenon “eco-nihilism,” the Canadian politician and activist Stuart Parker prefers “climate nihilism,” and others have tried out terms like “human futilitarianism.”

Whatever you call it, this is undeniably a real condition, if not one with a set of formal diagnostic criteria. (It may reach that status—it took decades for “burnout” to be declared an official “occupational phenomenon” by the World Health Organization.) It’s impossible to know how many people like Ruttan Walker have experienced climate despair as a mental health crisis, but despair is all around us: in our own momentary but intense reactions to the latest bit of climate news, in pitch-black memes and jokes about human extinction, even in works of philosophy and literature. There is now a fringe group of scientists and writers who not only take our imminent doom as an article of faith, but seem to welcome it.

This despair could be a consequence of climate change being on more people’s minds than ever before. According to social scientist and psychology scholar Renee Lertzman, author of 2015’s Environmental Melancholia, large numbers of people have recently come to the realization that climate change is real, scary, and not being addressed. “It’s a surreal experience because we’re still in the same system, so walking around, people are driving, and everyone’s eating a lot of meat [and] everyone’s acting like that’s normal,” she said. For some people, that feeling is incompatible with carrying on with the business of everyday life.

But climate despair goes far beyond a reasonable concern that a warming planet will make life more difficult and force humanity to make hard choices. Instead of rallying us, climate despair asks us to give up. In a 2009 study in the UK by researchers Saffron O’Neill and Sophie Nicholson-Cole, climate-related data visualizations were presented to test subjects who were urged, in fear-based terms, to take action or else. Most of the time these appeals produced “denial, apathy, avoidance, and negative associations.” Ultimately, the researchers concluded, “climate change images can evoke powerful feelings of issue salience but these do not necessarily make participants feel able to do anything about it; in fact, it may do the reverse.” In other words, if you tell people something must be done or we’re all gonna die, they tend to take door number two, however irrational that impulse may seem.

From a distance, climate despair may seem like ordinary anxiety and depression in patients who happen to be fixating on climate, but it’s hard to deny the unique effect climate change is having on mental health. On May 5, a group of psychologists and psychotherapists in Sweden published an open letter to their government that noted the perverse status quo of climate change—the concern wasn’t so much that the environment is breaking down, but that nothing was being done about it.

Specifically, the letter noted that children are aware that the grown-ups are leaving them a shitty world, and that’s a really messed-up thing to be aware of when you’re a kid. “A continued ecological crisis without an active solution focus from the adult world and decision makers poses a great risk that an increasing number of young people are affected by anxiety and depression,” reads the letter, in Swedish.

Simply reading facts about climate change can produce reactions not too dissimilar to Thunberg’s. The Uninhabitable Earth calls climate change “the end of normal,” explaining, “We have already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place, in an unsure and unplanned bet on just what that animal can endure.” Last year’s UN report on humanity’s probable failure to stop warming short of the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold had a similar message, as did the one from May about how 1 million species are on track to go extinct due to human-caused environmental degradation, assuming we don’t change our course and stop generating greenhouse gases (alongside other forms of environmental havoc). Also in May, an Australian think tank called climate change “a near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilization.”

These warning signs undoubtedly help spread awareness, but for some that awareness can breed hopelessness. Maisy Rohrer, a 22-year-old developmental researcher at New York University, has been struggling to cope with climate change for years. “I guess the despair started when I was 18, and I began learning about how much the earth was changing, and I’d have full-blown panic attacks about the arctic sea ice melting, and the polar bears starving, and I’d call my mom telling her life was pointless,” she said. She believed at the time that the human race “should be wiped out.”

“I became very suicidal, and a large part of my justification for feeling like I’d be better off dead was that humans are hurting the Earth so much, and I as one person [couldn’t] make enough of a positive impact so it would be better if I were not around to cause any more damage,” Rohrer said.

Even those who don’t have thoughts of suicide can be affected in profound ways by climate despair. Brooke Morrison is a 26-year-old radio host in North Carolina who chatters about pop music enthusiastically when she’s on air. Off-air, her world isn’t so bright. “I feel like I’m already grieving my life and my future,” she said. Even her life plans—she wants to move to Los Angeles—are colored by her pessimism. “I 100 percent believe that the West Coast will be underwater soon, and I’d like to experience it while there’s still time left,” she said.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

End excerpt Full article here: https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/j5w374/climate-despair-is-making-people-give-up-on-life

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Here are Climate Depot’s small sampling of wacky mental health climate articles below.

Claim: ‘If Everyone Tripped on Psychedelics, We’d Do More About Climate Change’ – ‘In 1960s & 70s, frequent use of psychedelic drugs coincided with widespread environmental movements’ – Vice Mag: “Scientists are looking into what psychedelics do to inspire people to act pro-environmentally…After taking LSD, Bill stood in his kitchen in Merseyside, England, staring at a large tree. When the tree started to speak to him, Bill only found it strange that the tree didn’t formally introduce itself, he told VICE in 2017. During the rest of their 15-minute chat, the tree clued Bill into the profound fact that all life on earth—plant, animal, and human—was intimately connected. “It was as if someone was inside my head judging my feelings, my thoughts, and my emotions,” Bill said…

We’ve seen this before: In the 1960s and 1970s, frequent use of psychedelic drugs coincided with widespread environmental movements. Some propose that it’s not a coincidence that these things came about together. But proving that the drugs cause environmentalism is a tough claim to make, since perhaps the type of people who take psychedelics also happen to care about the environment…Psychedelics promote pro-environmental activity via a much-discussed phenomenon in the drug research world called ego dissolution…

Michael Pollan, the author of the recent exploration of the life-changing nature of psychedelics, How to Change Your Mind, acknowledged that psychedelic experiences could possibly address the “environmental crisis, born of our sense of distance from nature: our willingness to objectify nature and see it merely as a resource.” But he followed up with a dose of reality: “Then you need to stand back and say, ‘Wait, is it possible to prescribe a drug for an entire country?’” Psychedelics are still illegal, and not suitable for everyone—some people with a family history of psychosis could be at risk with these compounds.

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This has been proposed before: See:Human Engineering: Meet NYU Professor Matthew Liao, who yearns to bio-engineer smaller, drug-ready humans

As his peer-reviewed study puts it, “Pharmacologically induced altruism and empathy could increase the likelihood that we adopt the necessary behavioral and market solutions for curbing climate change.” He emphasises there would be no coercion. The drugs would merely help those who want to be climate-friendly behaviour but lack the willpower.

USA Today documents how climate alarmism harms mental health – ‘It is merely the fear of a climate crisis and feelings of guilt that trigger mental health harm.’

STUDY: ‘Global warming’ causing an increase in ‘ecological grief’ – Published in the journal Nature Climate Change – ‘Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss’ — The journal Nature Climate Change – April 2018

The authors of the new study claim: “We anticipate, along with a small but growing number of scholars, that ecological grief will become an increasingly common human response to the losses encountered in the anthropocene.”

Study Makes Bizarre Claim That ‘Global Warming’ Could Alter People’s Personalities – A new Columbia Business School study is out with the latest bizarre claim about man-made global warming — it could alter people’s personalities. “As climate change continues across the world, we may also observe concomitant changes in human personality,” reads the study, published in the journal Nature on Tuesday.

Foreign Affairs Mag: ‘The Problem With Climate Catastrophizing – The Case for Calm’ (Written by )

Climate researchers and activists, according to a 2015 Esquire feature, “When the End of Human Civilization is Your Day Job,” suffer from depression and PTSD-like symptoms.

The Washington Post offers “the 7 psychological reasons that are stopping us from acting on climate change.”

‘Catastrophism can also lead to the trampling of democratic norms. It has produced calls for the investigation and prosecution of dissenters and disregard for constitutional limitations on government power.’

‘And yet, such catastrophizing is not justified by the science or economics of climate change. Working with a catastrophic mindset and a century-long timeline, one can construct an apocalyptic scenario from almost any problem.’

Under a political advocacy campaign launched Wednesday, a coalition of physician groups will tell the public that their health is threatened by catastrophic man-made global warming, also called climate change. Participating doctors will also urge government action to reduce the damage believed to be caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.

On Wednesday, the consortium issued a report titled, “Medical Alert! Climate Change Is Harming Our Health.”

“Here’s the message from America’s doctors on climate change: it’s not only happening in the Arctic Circle, it’s happening here,” Sarfaty said in the press release. “It’s not only a problem for us in 2100, it’s a problem now. And it’s not only hurting polar bears, it’s hurting us.”

Sarfaty has made numerous contributions to Democratic candidates, including former president Barack Obama, 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, according to the Federal Election Commission’s website. The consortium is run by The George Mason University Program on Climate & Health.

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Deep Despair Game

Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. responded with a ‘bullshit meter’ rating the claim as ‘total BS’

Warmist Meteorologist: ‘Climate Change’ and Trump Have Driven Me to Therapy – Meteorologist Eric Holthaus: ‘I know many people feel deep despair about climate, especially post-election.” And it’s because of this, “There are days where I literally can’t work,” and “We don’t deserve this planet.’

The peer-reviewed study by eight federal agencies can be found here.

‘Climate change also threatens mental health, the study found. Post traumatic stress disorder, depression, and general anxiety can all result in places that suffer extreme weather linked to climate change, such as hurricanes and floods. More study needs to be done on assessing the risks to mental health, it said.’…

Deep Despair: Soundtrack Crack Full

John Holdren, Obama’s senior science adviser, said steps the world agreed to in Paris last year to curb emissions through 2030 can help fight the risks to health. “We will need a big encore after 2030 … in order to avoid the bulk of the worst impacts described in this report,” he said.

Deep Despair: Soundtrack Crack Torrent

Aussie Study: ‘Climate Change’ Is Taking ‘A Toll On Farmers’ Mental Health’ (Based on survey of 22 farmers in one town) – “Increasingly variable weather was having a negative impact on many farmers’ wellbeing.”

“Uncertainty about growing conditions is having a noticeable impact on farmers’ mental health, according to a recent study out of Australia’s Murdoch University. To understand how climate change is impacting farmers’ mental wellbeing, Neville Ellis, from Murdoch University’s Centre for Responsible Citizenship and Sustainability, interviewed 22 farmers from the Australian town of Newdegate.” “One subject referred to the state of farmers’ mental health as akin to seasonal affective disorder — except that instead of suffering from lack of sunlight, farmers are suffering from a lack of rain.”