For four days in January, I sat – glued to my computer – as I watched the homes and neighbourhoods of the people I love burning to the ground in Los Angeles. I collated their addresses and I tracked the progress of the fires. I needed to know they were safe – and couldn’t look away. Even though the constant stream of images and videos were deeply upsetting. I was terrified for my friends.
I cover natural disasters all the time – it’s literally my job to report on the climate crisis. But this time? It hit differently. For the first time, danger was heading directly for the people I love.
I was a mess – emotionally, psychologically, and physically. And if you were to ask a mental health professional? They would probably have told you I was in the midst of some sort of mental health crisis and given me a psychiatric diagnosis. The reality though? I was reacting in a pretty understandable way to an ongoing catastrophe.
We are only one month into 2025, but we have already seen wildfires destroy over 12,000 homes and kill 29 people in Los Angeles. We’ve also seen Storm Eowyn – a record-breaking cyclone – batter many parts of the UK, an earthquake in Tibet, and floods and landslides in Pekalongan, Indonesia.
Research shows that both adults and young people feel like their mental wellbeing is getting worse. In 2024, 15.5% of UK adults reported their mental health as either “bad” or “the worst it’s ever been”. In England alone, over 500 children are referred to mental health services every day for anxiety. Is it any wonder, when the world is literally burning? How could you watch the news and not be filled with anxiety for what is to come?
Mental Health Bill
The Mental Health Bill [2025] is making its way through the House of Lords. It is an update to the Mental Health Act [1983]. This is the legal framework for assessing and treating those with severe mental health difficulties. The updated bill aims to give individuals better rights, improve mental health outcomes, and reduce inequalities. The main focus of both pieces of legislation is people who need involuntary hospital admissions.
Obviously, there is a place for this if someone is an immediate danger to themselves or others. However, the government is spending so much time, money, and energy on dealing with the very end result of poor policies. They are quick to institutionalise. However, they are far less ready to give someone the support and care they might need to recover and thrive. Additionally, cutting someone off from their own community is completely counterintuitive in the long run.
There is not a single piece of scientific evidence that supports the chemical imbalance theory of mental health problems. Yet still, the crux of government policy on mental health is to wait until people reach crisis point, detain them under the Mental Health Act, and medicate them. They have the ability and the political power to prevent many people from even getting to that point. They choose not to.
Instead, Labour could be focusing on the circumstances and conditions that we are all forced to exist in, which are creating and exacerbating mental health problems.
Similarly, Calum Miller, MP for Bicester, recently called on the Prime Minister to address the delays children and young people face when trying to access mental health support. He drew attention to the waiting times for Children and Adolescent Mental Health services (CAMHS) in Oxfordshire, and the rest of the country.
Again, instead of focusing on reducing waiting times for mental health treatment, why are they not turning their attention to improving the toxic conditions that lead so many young people to struggle with their mental health?
A deeply traumatic experience
The climate crisis is a prime example of this. Thanks to TikTok and other social media platforms, we now have the ability to watch all of these disasters as they unfold. The wildfires in the Pacific Palisades, just like the flooding in Valencia last year, were practically live streamed. How do we expect anyone to watch videos of people running from danger while their houses burn down, and then get a good night’s sleep?
Being alive, and paying attention to the world around us has become a deeply traumatic experience. Yet, ask any mental health charity or politician and they will tell you we are in the midst of a mental health crisis. Why are we surprised that people are struggling with their mental health? All you have to do is turn on the TV or social media and a torrent of terrifying – and very real news is there to greet you.
James Barnes, Psychotherapist and teaching faculty at Iron Mill College, Exeter told the Canary:
The climate crisis is an existential anxiety that *should* make us more anxious and/or depressed by default. If ‘health’ is proper psychological correspondence to reality (as psychiatry & CBT would have us believe), then we * should* be depressed and/or anxious a lot of the time given the mortal threat to the existence of humanity. If we are ‘happy’ at this time, that can only mean, from that standpoint, that we are employing psychological defenses to keep it out of our awareness.It reminds me of ‘depressive realism’ — where people who are depressed have been found to actually be more cognitively accurate in their appraisals of reality.
Barnes suggested that a non medical approach to looking at suffering moves away from biomedical dysfunction, towards an intelligible response – however disabling – to social, political and interpersonal circumstances.
As the Canary previously reported, this means changing the dominant question. From ‘what’s wrong with you’, to ‘what happened to you’ or, ‘what is happening to you’.
The ‘mental health crisis’ always already assumes, terminologically and by default, that the crisis is medical in nature — and therefore that medicine (and its de facto biomedical treatments) are what it is needed. This isn’t found, but assumed. Given that our best evidence shows that socio-psychological and political factors are by far the most important in what this ‘crisis’ is, there is very good reason to doubt that framing and look for a new one.
There are concrete steps that Keir Starmer’s government could be taking to improve the nation’s mental health. A great place to start would be curbing anxiety around the climate crisis. This means rather than handing out antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications, they should be protecting our planet.
The point of no return
Climate scientists identified that 2025 was the deadline limiting global warming to 1.5°C. Passing this threshold means an even greater risk of disastrous floods, droughts, and heatwaves. At the 2015 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 196 countries signed the Paris Agreement. This means they agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 43% by 2030. The sticking point however, is that they must have peaked before 2025 – which is here.
From reducing the burning of fossil fuels and switching to green energy to reducing the emissions from the financial sector, there are many things the UK government could be doing to tackle the climate crisis at the source.
Instead, it’s tinkering around at the edges of the problem with false climate solutions like carbon capture and storage (CCS) while green-lighting more environmentally-destructive projects like Heathrow’s third runway and the Stansted airport expansion.
The climate crisis is also inextricably linked to the cost of living crisis. There is no doubt this is also driving poor mental health. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) found that rates of depression were higher among people who were struggling to afford housing costs and energy bills.
Surely it’s common sense that struggling to pay their bills would make someone sad, or numb, or anxious – or suicidal. Climate disasters such as flooding and extreme temperatures directly impact energy and food costs, making the cost of living crisis worse.
Brainwashing
The government also pushes cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). This aims to get people to change their thoughts and behaviours. Sounds great, doesn’t it? But what happens when your thoughts are based upon facts?
For example, being anxious about your future is completely understandable. After all, we just watched the Pacific Palisades burn down as a direct result of the climate crisis. Humans are hardwired to survive.
In the UK, waiting lists for mental health treatment are estimated to now be over one million. So professionals are going to tell one million people that their thinking is the problem. Rather than the capitalist system that’s sidelining their wellbeing and destroying the world around them.
Similarly, asking people to change their thoughts means they believe themselves and their thoughts are the problem, rather than the conditions they are living in. This means they are far less likely to question the status quo. Obviously, the government does not want people questioning their policies – because that creates a problem.
What is clear to me is that the world is becoming a harder and harder place to exist in. There is a new climate disaster every week. It is only a matter of time before the nation’s mental health plummets to even greater lows.
Unless the government starts to think about the causes, instead of putting a plaster on a gaping wound they are adding fuel to an already raging fire – and there’s only one way it can end.
Feature image via Tricia Nelson
