麻豆社

It seemed a rather underwhelming headline. Climate Change is harming my Mental Health. Well, yeah. Mental welfare being now such an ubiquitous concept, one might as well say a rainy day damages mental health.

But for some eco-grief is very real. Phd student Jennifer Newall had to abandon her study on shrinking ice sheets when, taking a junior school workshop, she realised nothing was changing. She experienced debilitating depression and has decided she can鈥檛 have children. As has Kyle Downie, a climate activist now on medication. Caroline Hickman, a Bath academic, surveying ten thousand sixteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds, found half of them are angry, anxious or guilty about their melting world.

Given the issue, surely an appropriate reaction.

When my mother died my father鈥檚 heart broke. He鈥檇 always cared for her: now she lay in the cold earth, soaked in bitter winter rains. Therapy? He dismissed that idea in seconds: he鈥檇 lost his sweetheart of seventy years. Instead, at his one hundredth birthday party he sang the solo in the arrangement by Ralph Vaughan-Williams, whom he鈥檇 known as a boy: 鈥淥 yonder doth sit a little turtle dove, He doth sit on yonder high tree, A-making a moan for the loss of his love, As I will do for thee鈥︹��

Anguish entirely apt, in the face of life-changing loss.

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jesus mourned over the city he loved. If the God who made the sun, stars and sky can suffer sorrow, why should we lesser mortals look to therapise it away?

Most of us can鈥檛 cope with tragedy on a grand scale beyond our reach. My most recent books were inspired by our autistic son, who has such an objective view of the world it sometimes seems he feels the agony of eight billion as if each were his own. He shocked me by saying blithely he would cut off a limb if it might save the life of someone he鈥檇 never meet - A logical exchange to him.

I can鈥檛 encompass this. Looking at devastating photographs of a reservoir flooding a nation, I鈥檓 simply helpless and numb. Unable to do anything, I try to feel nothing, too. And it鈥檚 important, , not to be overwhelmed.

Pain for the world is appropriate鈥� but should also be effective. Embrace sadness, yes: our daughter鈥檚 little boys cry several times a week, and it鈥檚 fine if I do too. But also take action. I can鈥檛 stop a vast sea released by war terrorism. But I can turn off the heating and put a jumper on. I can go by bicycle and leave the car behind.

Jesus wept: but He also acted.

And we can act, as well

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