The planet’s well-being unites us all, from ecosystems to societies, global systems to individual health. How is planetary health linked to mental health?
Charlie Hertzog Young is a researcher, writer and award-winning activist. He identifies as a “proudly mad bipolar double amputee” and has worked for the New Economics Foundation, the Royal Society of Arts, the Good Law Project, the Four Day Week Campaign and the Centre for Progressive Change, as well as the UK Labour Party under three consecutive leaders. Charlie has spoken at the LSE, the UN and the World Economic Forum. He studied at Harvard, SOAS and Schumacher College and has written for The Ecologist, The Independent, Novara Media, Open Democracy and The Guardian. He is the author of Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Your book Spinning Out is a beautiful exploration and elucidation of the links between the climate crisis, mental health and social change. Reading your book is an uplifting experience and one I'd recommend to anyone interested in finding agency. As a young, leading climate change activist, you emerged from, as you describe in your book, a month long coma with some powerful realizations about the way climate chaos fuels mental health problems and why our information culture isn't adequately set up to support people in the distress which you write about so eloquently in your book. Can you take us back to that day in 2019 when you were consumed by anxiety and despair and things became too much to bear?
CHARLIE HERTZOG YOUNG
I've been a climate activist since I was about 12 years old. It began with a deep passion for wildlife. I started taking up litter and telling off my schoolmates, eventually I set up a green council when I was about 13 or 14. As I learned more and more about the climate crisis and how sprawling and interconnected it was, not just with nature, but with the oppression that exists within human society, I started getting more involved and impassioned, getting involved in protests, marches. When I was about 15 years old, I helped shut down an airport for a night. I eventually started going to the UN climate talks. I went to Davos and it started to become my everything. I felt like I was doing something meaningful about the crisis, but also felt a sense of deep despair and loss, both from the perspective of the impending collapse of the biosphere and also a deep dislocation from the dominant culture and the consensus reality. I felt like no one else was feeling the sense of urgency and emergency that I felt. I started to get incredibly anxious. In 2019, when I was 27, I jumped off a six storey building. My memory has blacked it out, but I spent a month in a coma and woke up having lost both of my legs. The five years since have been one of not just physical and mental recovery, but also trying to untangle the messy web of causality as to how and why it was that I lost my mind in the way I did. I try to find some of the gifts in that madness, what it was pointing towards in terms of the unbalance of the ecosphere and how human civilization has begun to operate completely out of step with the ecosphere.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Yes, it’s really important to hear those ways that you connect. I wanted to go back a little bit too, because there are gifts that come with a heightened sense of awareness of impending danger that is almost primal. As you say, madness can be visionary. And when you write about those visions, of being stalked by a wolf, it’s a foreboding, almost like a warning of impending danger. As you know, many Indigenous societies have dream theories and interpretations that reveal a philosophical order about the nature of the universe, and visions within many cultures are taken very seriously. Visions are seen as actually real. There's a reason for them. And, it made me reflect a lot about, if you pull back, to that time you saw a wild wolf stalking you in the street. This is a kind of metaphor for how we're treating the ecosphere, and the rest of the creatures that we share this planet with. It really calls into question who is more mad. Is it the kind of collective blindness that refuses to see the way we are behaving towards rest of the creatures we share the world with and pretending that our disrespect for the very planet that provides us with food, water, and shelter can go on being abused and sucked dry. Like the 300 million years it took for fossil fuels to form in the Earth has been depleted by humans in under 200 years.
HERTZOG YOUNG
Yeah, I mean there's that old saying, “blessed are the cracked for they shall let in the light.” For a lot of people like myself, I think it's true that losing your mind can be a proportionate response to the climate crisis. Those of us with mental health issues are often branded as being in our own world. But paradoxically, being in our own world can actually be a result of being more connected to the outside world rather than less. And in the context of climate change, it may be fairer to describe people who fail to develop psychological symptoms as being in their own separate anthropocentric world, inattentive to the experiences of the billions of other human and nonhuman beings on the planet, unaffected by looming existential catastrophe. There are layers and layers of insulation made up of civilizational narratives that dislocate many people from climate chaos and those whose psyches buckle upon contact with this reality are the ones deemed mad. But this pathologizing is a defense mechanism employed by the civilized or by the dominant culture, which ends up subjugating those of us whose minds stray from accepted norms. There are lots of studies that show that certain forms of psychosis are actually a form of meaning-making for communities that feel like they have no sense of purpose. We've had generations and generations of trauma visited upon the human species by picking apart communities and our intimate relationships with nature. Especially since the 80s, picking apart our inability to even consider ourselves as part of society in a meaningful sense. That kind of pulling apart means that we're locked in quite individual and atomized spaces, where when something as massive as climate change starts to happen, people feel both responsible for it, and completely unable to do anything about it. That's not me saying that being depressed is the only objective kind of indicator for reality, but it's quite easy for the human species to underestimate or discount quite how significantly dangerous our situation is and people with depression are more able to see that with eyes unclouded by biases.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
We do deny reality and the climate emergency, justifying our bad behavior by telling ourselves, “Oh, we survived this and that, so we'll survive this, too.” Of course, with climate change, it's completely non-linear. It goes up to a certain point and then, out of nowhere, a year's worth of rain falls in a day bringing flooding to your front door. Wildfires break out suddenly. These extreme climate events are a wake-up call, but it's often too late to do anything if you lose your home. So it’s really about rethinking capitalism and our extractivist relationship to the planet.
I spend a long time, as you do, I know, talking with students and teachers and unlike in the past where we'd talk about career paths or being anxious about exams and job choices or the future of work, students today are concerned about this underlying fear of the future because they can see that it's just overshadowing everything. The storms and the heat waves and the flooding and all these things you've described. I think that all young people would benefit from reading your book because you have been at the front lines since your early teens. But how do you feel we can overcome the apathy and inaction that is going on today?
HERTZOG YOUNG
I think it's very easy for this stuff to be paralyzing. I used to be in a space where I felt that as soon as I wasn't devastatingly ill, I had to hurl myself back at the problem of climate change or something to do with new economics or a new kind of politics. I would end up very quickly burning out. While I do think that it's deeply important for us to engage with these issues, it's really important that we engage with them in a way that isn't trying to approach them with an internal sense of emergency. I often get letters from people who have read my book or one of my articles saying, thank you for naming not just the phenomenon of eco anxiety, but some of the interiority of it, and saying that they feel seen. It's quite upsetting that it's not something people tend to feel safe just having as a normal topic of conversation. People are worried that they'll bring down the mood and so that puts us in these silos and that's a real problem. Only by opening up can we start to build a deeper sense of connection and potentially collective action. Another problem is that eco anxiety is often considered to be a predominantly Global North issue. In researching my book and speaking to people in the Global South, I did a lot of my work in Pakistan looking at the impacts of the floods. The WHO estimated that one in five people affected by things like massive flooding, hurricanes, heat waves, or droughts, are likely to experience some kind of severe mental health impact. Speaking to doctors in Pakistan, that number is often far higher. It's just not seen as a mental health issue because it's often interpreted as inevitable suffering. It's an extension of the kind of othering that is already visited upon the Global South that people's psychological distress doesn't count, because obviously people will be having a hard time if they've experienced a natural disaster. So organizations like the WHO fly in to deliver medication and then helicopter out again. And local doctors say it's no solution at all. You've got to be working with communities, asking people what their needs are, what their pillars of care were prior to a natural disaster, and how to try and restore those again.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Yeah. It’s terrible the way that is. Some people are expected to just take that burden of suffering like it's an act of God, when it's an act of our abuse of this planet. I've had conversations with people like Bertrand Piccard who has said we have to put it aside. He's not denying the eco anxiety, but says you have to work within the capitalist systems to give people the solutions so that then they don't have that despair too. So I think we have to not deny that it's there, but then also provide those solutions. And I hope that all these solutions come up at the speed they need to take place.
HERTZOG YOUNG
One of the most promising and surprisingly effective on the first try solutions that I came across while looking at this stuff was from a doctor Dr. Asma Humayun who works in Pakistan. Prior to the flooding, she was already working on a massive nested mental health and psychosocial support program. What they were doing was, within a month, they managed to train a thousand people in psychological first aid in the community. People who were not just doctors and nurses, but also teachers, social workers, people who had high contact with people in the community. They trained people to look out for psychological distress, learn how to respond with mental health first aid, and also look after their own mental health. That network of a thousand people then linked in through an app that was very low bandwidth so it could work even when there wasn't good internet so they could link in with people who were slightly more trained to provide people with the care that they needed. So an area of 1 million people that previously only had one psychiatrist was fully networked with a nested system where people were not only able to get support, but also able to build their own networks of support and new practices of support. That has now been taken on by the Pakistani government and is potentially going to be mapped out across the nation as some kind of iterative feedback response for communities to build on that already existing resilience and that already existing knowledge, rather than just relying on these very brittle old systems of having one specialized person with a massive, massive population of people who have really high needs and usually never even go to a psychiatrist because they wouldn't think that they get help or that their condition is something that could be alleviated. One of the really surprising outputs is that 50 percent of people who are referred to services and use them came back, which is an astronomically high proportion in this field. So it's one example of how you can work within a capitalist system, but also start to bake in community resilience and empower communities to do things together.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
I think that that's so important to hear. Often in these moments of crisis, we’re lucky to be around this community of friends, but sometimes they don't occur when we're close to those that we trust and we feel safe with. Maybe the racing thoughts come at an unexpected moment. What are some of those ways that you can pull back from that, so you can be gentle on your mind and not focus on what lies ahead?
HERTZOG YOUNG
There's a whole section in my book about tips and advice. Not just of mine, but of many people who are similar to me and have been doing this stuff for a long time. One of the ways that I try to maintain a feeling of safety while also not collapsing into a state of passivity, and it's taken a very long time for me to learn this, but it’s being forgiving with myself. One of the people who I write about a lot in the book is Jennifer Uchandu, a Nigerian climate activist and mental health activist who sets up an organization called The Eco-Anxiety in Africa Project. She talks about needing to remind herself constantly. Her test is not whether she's doing enough, it's whether she's doing her best. And doing her best doesn't mean doing as much as she possibly can, it means having the right balance of self care and action. Recently I've been really struggling with insomnia because I've still got quite bad nerve pain from my surgeries. And it sounds so simple and I used to get annoyed at these things, but just breathing. You know, deep breathing and kind of breathing into my back. Spending time in nature is also helpful. It can be quite hard for me because my mobility isn't always great on my prosthetics or if I'm in a wheelchair, but I swim a lot. And I draw a lot. One of the things that's been really amazing is that over the last few years, me and my friends have gotten into the habit of calling one another as first points of contact, not just in crisis, but if we've had a tricky day.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
I don't believe in the silver bullet of AI or technology that will solve all these problems, but I have mixed feelings and perhaps you do too. I just wonder about your reflections on AI in terms of helping us balance the energy grid or solve the climate crisis. We also know that it consumes a lot of energy, so how do we navigate those risks and potential benefits?
HERTZOG YOUNG
I think that certain kinds of AI can be really helpful for, as you say, balancing the grid or by relieving humans of certain kinds of manual repetitive labor arduous labor, so long as that actually transfers into people having more time. The economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that we've had enough of a rise in productivity that we could be working 15 hour weeks and have the same amount as people had decades ago. However, because of the structure of the economic system, that productivity rise has not transferred into more free time. I'm slightly scared about utopian visions about AI freeing humans from work, because I don't think we have enough of a social and political infrastructure to actually reap most of the gains if that were to happen. I think deeper down, I'm concerned because we call it “artificial intelligence,” but we don't even know what organic intelligence is. We have a very limited and very brittle understanding of what intelligence is, what the mind is, and we see this first hand over and over again in medical circles. There's a very circuit-based treatment of the human mind, and mental health issues are often treated as a glitch. When we've got a deeply flawed and frankly quite infantile understanding of what intelligence is, we're going to build something that is not in any way linked in healthfully with the ecosystem. I do think that there are some useful, utilitarian, appropriate uses of it, but they should be really kept limited. I'm worried that AI will serve those interests that have already subjugated and dominated because of the kinds of intelligence it chooses to put central to its way of operating. There's also a certain amount of arrogance implicit in the way that AI is talked about, that it is somehow, not just superior to any single human mind, but it's come from a superior kind of human mind. I think it's the same kind of human mind that has got us into the problems that we've already experienced. And the same kind of thinking is unlikely to be able to solve those issues.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Exactly. Let's not duplicate our mistakes through another hyper-industrialized system. And just so in closing, on a optimistic note, as you think about the future, the future of education, the importance of the arts, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?
HERTZOG YOUNG
I think I'll answer it from a slightly different tack, which is the thing that was most important to me as a young person in learning about these issues, but also feeling a modicum of safety and direction, helping me really pursue the things I was curious about, and have a more intimate relationship with my values. The thing that was important to me was having mentors. And I would really recommend that young people take a bit of a risk and ask people they want to learn from whether they can spend time with them and listen to their stories to learn from their experiences. I think one of the most promising things is rebuilding intergenerational relationships. This fight is one that has been going on for generations upon generations. It is a fight that is as old as human civilization. And so one of the main things I'd like young people to know is that they don't have to reinvent the wheel. They can reach out to those that they want to emulate and trust those relationships.
