A string of headlines culled from the New York Times across the last five years demonstrates an emergent understanding of the profound effects of climate change on mental health: “Got Climate Anxiety?,” “How to Calm Your Climate Anxiety,” “How Do We Feel About Global Warming? It’s Called Eco-Anxiety,” “How Climate Change Inflicts a Toll on Mental Health,” “Do You Experience Climate Anxiety?,” and “This Is What Keeps My Eco-Anxiety in Check.”[1]

“Ecoanxiety,” a term adopted by the American Psychological Association in 2017 to describe a “chronic fear of environmental doom,” is becoming widespread enough that psychotherapists are seeking specialized training in its treatment.[2] A 2022 poll by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that a majority of Americans are “somewhat worried” or “very worried” about climate change, with ten percent of American adults “experiencing symptoms of anxiety because of global warming for at least ‘several days’ out of the last two weeks, including ‘feeling nervous, anxious, or on edge because of global warming’ (11%) or ‘not being able to stop or control worrying about global warming’ (9%).”[3] These somewhat alarming statistics go hand in hand with recent studies indicating that the mental health of teenagers and young adults is declining. As executive James P. Steyer put it in an interview with the Times about Common Sense Media’s recent poll about young adult mental health and political engagement, “The data is pretty stark: Our kids are not all right.”[4]

With the rise of ecological disasters and palpably more extreme weather affecting students in ways both dramatic and mundane, it is impossible to ignore the effects of climate change on their mental health. University efforts to address student mental health often involve important but in many cases all-too-temporary access to understaffed counseling centers and single-day activities like pet therapy scheduled during finals weeks.[5] Meanwhile, curricula in environmental studies, geology, meteorology, biology, and engineering often deal with climate change directly, describing and studying natural phenomena, preparing students for careers that help mitigate the effects of climate change, and creating pathways for climate advocacy. Research has demonstrated that such coursework is psychologically beneficial, and that “social support” around the climate issues at the root of psychiatric distress, including through classes, “is one of the strongest predictors of mental well-being.”[6] The humanities, I think, are in a privileged position to offer courses that work through aspects of climate anxiety through pedagogies of care—without necessarily the promise of a solution, but with an analytical commitment that can offer some therapeutic effects. Positioning our current crisis within the context of human grappling with cosmologies and “the meaning of life” across millennia can provide one source of the “social support” identified by researchers as crucial to addressing mental health concerns.

To say that humanities courses can address climate change without offering specific solutions is not to deny the fact that tangible actions must be taken, but to acknowledge that growing up in a radically precarious world with an alarmingly uncertain future warrants attention to human psyches and communities without always returning to a to-do list or reminder of responsibility. Burgeoning scholarship around ecological grief, defined as a response of suffering to “climate-related losses to valued species, ecosystems, and landscapes” and solastalgia, “the distress caused by ecological change,” is beginning to explore the direct psychological toll of climate change.[7] A pedagogy of care in an age of climate anxiety entails giving space for airing and analyzing the unruly affects brought on by a changing planet.

It was with my own combination of despair, grief, and unease, and my own hopes of contextualizing such sensations within a history of human reckoning with a fragile and inevitably-ending world, that I decided to teach a course on “Envisioning Apocalypse” in the fall of 2019. We began with a lively reading of St. John’s Book of Revelations, a text none of my students had read before, whose vivid images of the end of the world include disease, fire, stars falling from the heavens, and rising seas. We were collectively struck not so much by the ways we could project current events backward and see this text as uncannily prophetic, but rather by a sense that what we are experiencing as climate anxiety has been experienced for millennia, in one form or another. We share with past lives the recognition that our environment is not stable and depends on an improbable alignment of geological and cosmic forces and materials that are terrifyingly impermanent. Seeing this certainly does not assure my students of a human future, but rather provides a forum for processing communally—and across historical epochs—feelings about the future that can be overwhelming in solitude.

The course’s exploration of apocalypse also included discussions of indigenous visions of apocalypse and work that addresses the already realized apocalypse that imperialism inflicted on large swaths of the world.[8] This attuned students to the privilege that accompanies certain kinds of environmental dread—as climate change wreaks its “slow violence” disproportionately on populations of the Global South and socioeconomically disadvantaged populations globally, we must recognize that this form of growing unlivability is a continuing part of the systematic historical oppression of colonized peoples. Such a historical perspective makes the common positioning of the apocalypse in the future seem wildly misguided. My students grappled, then, with how to view apocalypse as having different timelines for different people, and not existing solely as the province of the future. The course also addressed ways of thinking against conventional timelines that prioritize the future. We read Lee Edelman’s takedown of “reproductive futurism” and had discussions of how queer politics can resist the constant invocation of the Child and the future which can come at the expense of the rights of actual living people.

In addition to more theoretical and historical work, the course engaged with a number of films, including Contagion, Space Is the Place, Train to Busan, Interstellar, Wandering Earth, Melancholia, Embrace of the Serpent, Angels in America, Take Shelter, Juan of the Dead, Chasing Ice, Safe, the TV series Preppers, and an apocalypse-themed episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Together, the screenings, accompanying readings, and discussions foregrounded the affects of apocalypse—the ways individuals’ mentalities reflect and respond to the crumbling world through melancholy, grief, optimism, fear, anxiety, hope, resignation, and so on—feelings the students themselves have experienced in our current moment of global environmental collapse. Seeing those sentiments reflected onscreen allowed students to work through the psychological realities of this era, and to explore their provenance, their meanings, and even their potentials.

Heartbreakingly, the class was even more immediately relevant than I’d realized. Just a month after the course concluded, I heard from one of my students who was home in China. “I think you must have heard of the recent outbreak of Wuhan Coronavirus in China. On the Internet and in reality, entire China has sunk into the worst panic in 20 years since SARS. Every day when I see thousands of news, it nearly engulfs everyone, and keeps reminding me of our class. I've never thought of an apocalypse like the one in Contagion really comes so quickly. I think of everything that we talked about in class. . . . I just feel like I should talk to you about my feelings, and how important this class is to my life.” The havoc wrought by the pandemic disaster on our students’ mental health is still revealing itself, and more than ever the classroom feels like a space that must deal with the correspondences between global catastrophe and individual states of mind. We don’t often find ourselves wishing our courses could be less relevant to our students’ lives, but when it comes to apocalypse, I’d happily get an email from a student declaring the class entirely irrelevant. Until that day comes, my pedagogy of care will involve ensuring there is space in the classroom to lay out and delve into human experiences, visions, and narratives of apocalypse.

Hannah Goodwin is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Mount Holyoke College. Her book Stardust: Cinematic Archives at the End of the World (U. Minnesota Press, 2024) traces the interconnected technologies, aesthetics, and temporalities of astronomy and the cinema around moments of crisis. She has published work in Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime, Uncanny Histories in Film and Media, El cine documental de Patrico Guzmán, Communication, Culture & Critique, and Journal of Film and Video.

1. Molly Peterson, “How to Calm Your Climate Anxiety,” New York Times, June 23, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/23/well/mind/mental-health-climate-anxiety.html; Jason Horowitz, “How Do We Feel About Global Warming? It’s Called Eco-Anxiety,” New York Times, September 16, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/16/world/europe/italy-greece-eco-anxiety.html; Susan Shain, “Got Climate Anxiety?: These People Are Doing Something About It,” New York Times, February 4, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/climate/climate-anxiety-stress.html; Ron Currie, “This Is What Keeps My Eco-Anxiety in Check,” New York Times, October 24, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/opinion/plastic-pollution-beaches-trash.html; Sarah Kerr et al., “How Climate Change Inflicts a Toll on Mental Health,” New York Times, March 9, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/09/us/mental-health-climate-change.html; Callie Holtermann, “Do You Experience Climate Anxiety?” New York Times, October 18, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/18/learning/do-you-experience-climate-anxiety.html. ↑

2. Cited in Brooke Jarvis, “Climate Change is Keeping Therapists Up at Night,” New York Times, October 21, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/21/magazine/climate-anxiety-therapy.html. ↑

3. Anthony Leiserowitz et al., “Climate Change in the American Mind,” Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, February 16, 2023, https://live-yccc.pantheon.io/publications/climate-change-in-the-american-mind-beliefs-attitudes-december-2022/toc/5/. ↑

4. Claire Cain Miller, “Today’s Teenagers: Anxious About Their Futures and Disillusioned by Politicians,” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/29/upshot/teens-politics-mental-health.html. ↑

5. Mary Ellen Flannery, “The Mental Health Crisis on College Campuses,” NEA Today, March 29, 2023, accessed July 11, 2024, https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/mental-health-crisis-college-campuses. ↑

6. Sarah Lowe, quoted in “Yale Experts Explain Climate Anxiety,” Yale Sustainability, Yale.edu, March 13, 2023, accessed July 11, 2024 https://sustainability.yale.edu/explainers/yale-experts-explain-climate-anxiety. ↑

7. Ashlee Consolo and Neville R. Ellis, “Ecological Grief as a Mental Health Response to Climate-Related Loss,” Nature 8 (2018): 275–281; Glenn Albrecht et al., “Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change,” Australasian Psychiatry 15 (2007): S95–S98. See also Linsday P. Galway et al., “Mapping the Solostalgia Literature: A Scoping Review Study,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 16, n. 2662 (2019). ↑

8. See for example Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018). ↑