The front page of the New York Times on Monday featured a ridiculous story by “mental health” reporter Ellen Barry, “Anxiety Over Climate Changes Lands on the Therapist’s Couch.”
Yes, the same newspaper that for months ignored the clear negative mental health effects (on both children and adults) of lockdowns, distancing, and lack of school activities are now placing front-page focus on a disease of the rich: apocalyptic worries over climate change. Now those are worries that The Times itself has spent years stirring up itself among its liberal readership.
Without mocking the patients -- who deserve pity, if not this kind of obsequious coverage – it’s clear this is a story only The Times would assign, much less put it on the front page as if was some kind of health trend outside liberal bubbles. Note how “Trader Joe’s” was a giveaway about the socioeconomics of climate hysterics (click “expand”):
It would hit Alina Black in the snack aisle at Trader Joe’s, a wave of guilt and shame that made her skin crawl.
Something as simple as nuts. They came wrapped in plastic, often in layers of it, that she imagined leaving her house and traveling to a landfill, where it would remain through her lifetime and the lifetime of her children.
She longed, really longed, to make less of a mark on the earth. But she had also had a baby in diapers, and a full-time job, and a 5-year-old who wanted snacks. At the age of 37, these conflicting forces were slowly closing on her, like a set of jaws.
In the early-morning hours, after nursing the baby, she would slip down a rabbit hole, scrolling through news reports of droughts, fires, mass extinction. Then she would stare into the dark.
This is just liberal indulgence of neuroticism and hysteria in the name of fighting “climate anxiety”:
A decade ago, Dr. Doherty and a colleague, Susan Clayton, a professor of psychology at the College of Wooster, published a paper proposing a new idea. They argued that climate change would have a powerful psychological impact -- not just on the people bearing the brunt of it, but on people following it through news and research. At the time, the notion was seen as speculative.
That skepticism is fading. Eco-anxiety, a concept introduced by young activists, has entered a mainstream vocabulary....
The underlying anti-capitalist message poked through the bizarre leaps from diapers to wildfires (click “expand”):
She understands how privileged she is; she describes her anxiety as a “luxury problem.” But still: The plastic toys in the bathtub made her anxious. The disposable diapers made her anxious. She began to ask herself, what is the relationship between the diapers and the wildfires?
(....)
A big part of [Dr. Thomas Doherty’s] practice is helping people manage guilt over consumption: He takes a critical view of the notion of a climate footprint, a construct he says was created by corporations in order to shift the burden to individuals.
[Black’s] goal is not to be released from her fears about the warming planet, or paralyzed by them, but something in between: She compares it to someone with a fear of flying, who learns to manage their fear well enough to fly.
Flying? Don’t you know what air travel does to the atmosphere?
