Is that a correct definition?
Certainly. It is a new and evolving phenomenon, so much so that on the back of it another term is now spreading: eco-depression. That is, a type of depression that would arise following the prolonged anxious state that develops in adolescents in relation to the climate and environmental emergency.
So we are always talking about adolescents.
I should start with a premise. Adolescence is a phase of life physiologically characterised by a loss of reference points. One loses one’s childhood role in order to acquire, not immediately of course, the adult one.
One loses one’s childhood body in order to become an adult. And above all one loses the parents’ role as a point of reference. So the adolescent is by nature someone looking for something to lean on.
For this reason the individual is always susceptible to all the “fashions”, let’s say, or even extreme situations that society puts forward. At the moment our society is pervaded by environmental and climate alarm; especially here in the West, where this strong fear of the future is pervasive.
The idea of the future inevitably brings fears with it, because it is uncertain. But today this fear seems to turn into real fear, almost uncontrolled.
Clearly there is a very precarious idea of the future. Previous generations, mine for example, had a completely different vision of the future. And it was predominantly positive: we thought the future would be rosy.
Now, instead, there is the idea that the future will be, at the very least, very problematic. From this arise all these manifestations of anxiety, which are not easy to deal with.
Why?
Because they are not just symptoms, but a “ideological” way, so to speak, of experiencing reality. When they take root in a boy or a girl, they become something really hard to eradicate, even for those who want to help.
But anxiety can be treated.
The anxious state can certainly be treated with some medication and some kind of therapy; but then there are the more general consequences.
For example, if an adolescent says and thinks that there is no future, he or she is not inclined to build friendships or romantic and sexual relationships. And so one might as well remain in the limbo in which one is living at the moment, an eternal adolescent.
We are living through a phase in which adolescence is no longer confined to the age that would be physiological, from fourteen or fifteen to eighteen or twenty. It is becoming an adolescence that never ends, extended to thirty, forty years old.
Especially among young women, girls, these thoughts are often accompanied by a declaration that they do not want children. The young woman talking to the minister said so too.
I wonder whether this “paralysing” fear is not attributable to something deeper than simple eco-anxiety. That is, whether fear of the environmental future is not the epiphenomenon of a more general fear.
Let’s say that, once human beings managed to keep pregnancy under control thanks to effective contraception, the question of deciding to bring someone into the world became central for each of us.
Paradoxically, when people had children at twenty there was much more, how shall I put it, spontaneity; many young men and women had a child because “everyone does”. Now that people begin having children at thirty, thirty-five or even forty, as happens today, it is clear that questions arise.
I have several patients who are thirty-three or thirty-four. When I ask them: “What decisions have you made about motherhood? What are your thoughts on the possibility of having a child?” They almost always answer: “Ah, but nowadays you have to think about it carefully.”
Certainly the environmental problem comes into the assessment. “What sense is there in bringing a child into the world when he or she will face a world that is difficult, to say the least?”
Because another thing to stress is that the hypotheses about the future of the environment are objectively catastrophic. In the last month alone, while I was on holiday, I read two hypotheses that can be described as catastrophic: the possibility that, from a certain point not far off, the Gulf Stream will run out.
And so it will cease its function of warming a large part of northern Europe. For one part of the continent an exceptional cooling is in prospect. For the other, the centre-south, an equally exceptional warming.
Can these phenomena of eco-anxiety, however, also have positive aspects? Is there a way of turning fear into strength, perhaps with the help of a therapist, into a form of resilience, into a will to act?
Anxiety in itself is a positive thing. It is like pain: pain is useful, because it gives me essential information. If I had no sense of pain I would be like Pinocchio, who falls asleep in front of the fire and burns his legs, because he has no sense of pain, being a puppet.
Similarly, anxiety tells me that something is wrong and that I must do something to change my life. So, if it does not exceed a certain level, it can certainly spur young people to change their lifestyle and to get together with their peers to try to change things.
Anxiety becomes negative when it turns into a repetitive mechanism. And above all when it makes you think: “Anyway, I am one in eight billion, I can’t do anything about it.”
If this conviction prevails – “I am one in eight billion, the other seven billion nine hundred and ninety-nine million do nothing. Things cannot be changed. And I can do nothing, I am worth nothing” – then prostration sets in in the young person.
That is the moment when the intervention of someone who helps the boy or girl can be useful, and perhaps necessary. It may be family members, friends, the social fabric.
Now, Doctor, on this point. When should the parents of an adolescent who shows this eco-anxiety, this distress, consider the option of a course of therapy?
I was talking about this just a few days ago with the father of a twenty-two-year-old who is one of the so-called NEETs: an acronym meaning that they neither work nor study. That young man had done very well during his classical secondary school; then, when he found himself studying law like his father, he discovered he found no satisfaction in it.
At the same time, however, he does nothing else: he does not try to change course, he does not go to work, he does not plan to go abroad to learn a language, nothing. He stays at home, goes out very little with friends, spends a lot of time on his mobile phone. The father asked me: “But what can I do?”
What can parents do?
I would say that the first important sign to consider is when this social withdrawal occurs. When a boy or a girl starts to have no more relationships, no longer sees friends, stays shut in at home, then it is time to do something.
Other important signs are psychosomatic ones, that is, when distress shows itself in the body. For girls it is typically excessive weight loss, bordering on anorexia. Or symptoms such as constant headaches, being unable to sleep at night, complaining of physical ailments. In boys, psychosomatic manifestations in the stomach are frequent. These are the most evident manifestations, which should lead parents to take the matter seriously and turn to someone for help.
