Research shows that people increasingly feel the effects of these planetary changes and associated ecological losses in their daily lives, and that these changes present significant direct and indirect threats to mental health and well-being. Climate change, and the associated impacts to land and environment, for example, have recently been linked to a range of negative mental health impacts, including depression, suicidal ideation, post-traumatic stress, as well as feelings of anger, hopelessness, distress, and despair.
Not well represented in the literature, however, is an emotional response we term ‘ecological grief,’ which we have defined in a recent Nature Climate Change article: “The grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems, and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change.”
We believe ecological grief is a natural, though overlooked, response to ecological loss, and one that is likely to affect more of us into the future.
Grief takes many forms and differs greatly between individuals and cultures. Although grief is well understood in relation to human losses, ‘to grieve’ is rarely considered something that we do in relation to losses in the natural world.
The eminent American naturalist Aldo Leopold was among the first to describe the emotional toll of ecological loss in his 1949 book, A Sand County Almanac: “One of the penalties of an ecological education,” he wrote, “is to live alone in a world of wounds.”
More recently, many respected ecologists and climate scientists have expressed their feelings of grief and distress in response to climate change and the environmental destruction it entails in places like: “Climate scientists feel weight of the world on their shoulders” and “Is this how you feel?”
Ecological grief is also a significant theme in our own work. In different research projects working with Inuit in Inuit Nunangat in Arctic Canada and farmers in the Western Australian Wheatbelt, both of us have spent a combined total of almost 20 years working with people living in areas experiencing significant climatic changes and environmental shifts.
Despite very different geographical and cultural contexts, our research revealed a surprising degree of commonality between Inuit and family farming communities as they struggled to cope, both emotionally and psychologically, with mounting ecological losses and the prospect of an uncertain future.
Our research shows that climate-related ecological losses can trigger grief experiences in several ways. Foremost, people grieve for lost landscapes, ecosystems, species, or places that carry personal or collective meaning.
For Inuit communities in the Inuit Land Claim Settlement Area of Nunatsiavut, Labrador, Canada, the land is foundational to mental health. In recent years, melting sea ice prevented travel to significant cultural sites and engagement in traditional cultural activities, such as hunting and fishing. These disruptions to an Inuit sense of place was accompanied by strong emotional reactions, including grief, anger, sadness, frustration and despair.
One male who grew up hunting and trapping on the land in the community of Rigolet, Nunatsiavut explained:
“People are not who they are. They’re not comfortable and can’t do the same things. If something is taken away from you, you don’t have it. If a way of life is taken away because of circumstances you have no control over, you lose control over your life.”
Chronic drought conditions in the Western Australian Wheatbelt elicited similar emotional reactions for some family farmers. As one long-time farmer described:
“There’s probably nothing worse than seeing your farm go in a dust storm. I reckon it’s probably one of the worst feelings […] I find that one of the most depressing things of the lot, seeing the farm blow away in a dust storm. That really gets up my nose, and a long way up too. If its blowing dust I come inside - I just come inside here. I can’t stand to watch it.”
Sweeping away the dust in the central Western Australian Wheatbelt Feb. 2013.
Neville Ellis
In both cases, such experiences resonate strongly with the concept of “solastagia,” described both as a form of homesickness while still in place, and as a type of grief over the loss of a healthy place or a thriving ecosystem.
People also grieve for lost environmental knowledge and associated identities. In these cases, people mourn the part of self-identity that is lost when the land upon which it is based changes or disappears.
For Australian family farmers, the inability to maintain a healthy landscape in the context of worsening seasonal variability and chronic dryness often elicited feelings of self-blame and shame:
“Farmers just hate seeing their farm lift; it somehow says to them ‘I’m a bad farmer’. And I think all farmers are good farmers. They all try their hardest to be. They all love their land.”
For older Inuit in Nunatsiavut, changes to weather and landscape are invalidating long-standing and multi-generational ecological knowledge, and with it, a coherent sense of culture and self. As one well-respected hunter shared:
“It’s hurting in a way. It’s hurting in a lot of ways. Because I kinda thinks I’m not going to show my grandkids the way we used to do it. It’s hurting me. It’s hurting me big time. And I just keep that to myself.”
Many Inuit and family farmers also worry about their futures, and express grief in anticipation of worsening ecological losses. As one woman explained from Rigolet, Nunatsiavut:
“I think that [the changes] will have an impact maybe on mental health, because it’s a depressing feeling when you’re stuck. I mean for us to go off [on the land] is just a part of life. If you don’t have it, then that part of your life is gone, and I think that’s very depressing.”
Similarly, a farmer in Australia worried about the future shared their thoughts on the possibility of losing their family farm:
“[It] would be like a death. Yeah, there would be a grieving process because the farm embodies everything that the family farm is … And I think if we were to lose it, it would be like losing a person … but it would be sadder than losing a person … I don’t know, it would be hard definitely.”
Ecological grief reminds us that climate change is not just some abstract scientific concept or a distant environmental problem. Rather, it draws our attention to the personally experienced emotional and psychological losses suffered when there are changes or deaths in the natural world. In doing so, ecological grief also illuminates the ways in which more-than-humans are integral to our mental wellness, our communities, our cultures, and for our ability to thrive in a human-dominated world.
From what we have seen in our own research, although this type of grief is already being experienced, it often lacks an appropriate avenue for expression or for healing. Indeed, not only do we lack the rituals and practices to help address feelings of ecological grief, until recently we did not even have the language to give such feelings voice. And it is for these reasons that grief over losses in the natural world can feel, as American ecologist Phyllis Windle put it, ‘irrational, inappropriate, anthropomorphic.’
We argue that recognising ecological grief as a legitimate response to ecological loss is an important first step for humanising climate change and its related impacts, and for expanding our understanding of what it means to be human in the Anthropocene. How to grieve ecological losses well — particularly when they are ambiguous, cumulative and ongoing — is a question currently without answer. However, it is a question that we expect will become more pressing as further impacts from climate change, including loss, are experienced.
We do not see ecological grief as submitting to despair, and neither does it justify ‘switching off’ from the many environmental problems that confront humanity. Instead, we find great hope in the responses ecological grief is likely to invoke. Just as grief over the loss of a loved person puts into perspective what matters in our lives, collective experiences of ecological grief may coalesce into a strengthened sense of love and commitment to the places, ecosystems and species that inspire, nurture and sustain us. There is much grief work to be done, and much of it will be hard. However, being open to the pain of ecological loss may be what is needed to prevent such losses from occurring in the first place.
Moonrise near Rigolet, Nunatsiavut, Canada.
Ashlee Cunsolo
Neville Ellis, Research fellow, University of Western Australia and Ashlee Cunsolo, Director, Labrador Institute, Memorial University of Newfoundland
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The Sleep Loss map offers a global indication of the places people lie awake at hours when most are sleeping. It’s an incomplete picture, because the data is based on tweets, and access to Twitter varies by country for a number of reasons, from government-imposed censorship (Russia, China) to the unending ravages of colonialism (a lot of Africa). U.K.-based blinds manufacturer Hillarys, the company behind the project, designates a tiny digital point of light on a world map to represent Twitter users who have sent messages about not being able to sleep. The more people who are staring at their screens and tweeting when they should be sleeping—the exact opposite of the way to cure insomnia—the more bathed in light an area of the map becomes.
As Breena Kerr notes on Vice’s Tonic, the United States has the most sleep-deprived folks of the countries tracked, at least according to Twitter data. There also seems to be some clear overlap between sleeplessness and having voted against Trump. In the center of the country, the dots of light are scattered across the landscape, some with a fair amount of distance between them. Look out at the edges of the country, though, and you’ll notice more points of light that are densely packed, forming brightly lit patches.
There are probably other contributing factors to the sleep gaps the map depicts. As Kerr points out, “60 percent of Americans in rural areas use social media, compared with 71 percent in suburban areas and 69 percent in urban areas, according to the Pew Research Center's data.” There’s also likely a cultural difference: “late-night” towns like New York, where everything’s open later and the pace of life is hectic, probably have more people up and tweeting than a sleepier town where things shut down by 9pm. But as Kerr notes, Trump anxiety—which is more present in places that didn’t vote for the president—definitely includes sleeplessness.
“Victims of Trump-induced anxiety describe nightmares, insomnia, digestive problems, and headaches,” Slate’s Michelle Goldberg wrote back in September. “Therapists find themselves helping their patients through a process that feels less like an election than a national nervous breakdown."
Scientists have long tried to pin down the exact relationship between depression and language, and technology is helping us get closer to a full picture. Our new study, published in Clinical Psychological Science, has now unveiled a class of words that can help accurately predict whether someone is suffering from depression.
Traditionally, linguistic analyses in this field have been carried out by researchers reading and taking notes. Nowadays, computerised text analysis methods allow the processing of extremely large data banks in minutes. This can help spot linguistic features which humans may miss, calculating the percentage prevalence of words and classes of words, lexical diversity, average sentence length, grammatical patterns and many other metrics.
So far, personal essays and diary entries by depressed people have been useful, as has the work of well-known artists such as Cobain and Plath. For the spoken word, snippets of natural language of people with depression have also provided insight. Taken together, the findings from such research reveal clear and consistent differences in language between those with and without symptoms of depression.
Language can be separated into two components: content and style. The content relates to what we express – that is, the meaning or subject matter of statements. It will surprise no one to learn that those with symptoms of depression use an excessive amount of words conveying negative emotions, specifically negative adjectives and adverbs – such as “lonely”, “sad” or “miserable”.
More interesting is the use of pronouns. Those with symptoms of depression use significantly more first person singular pronouns – such as “me”, “myself” and “I” – and significantly fewer second and third person pronouns – such as “they”, “them” or “she”. This pattern of pronoun use suggests people with depression are more focused on themselves, and less connected with others. Researchers have reported that pronouns are actually more reliable in identifying depression than negative emotion words.
We know that rumination (dwelling on personal problems) and social isolation are common features of depression. However, we don’t know whether these findings reflect differences in attention or thinking style. Does depression cause people to focus on themselves, or do people who focus on themselves get symptoms of depression?
The style of language relates to how we express ourselves, rather than the content we express. Our lab recently conducted a big data text analysis of 64 different online mental health forums, examining over 6,400 members. “Absolutist words” – which convey absolute magnitudes or probabilities, such as “always”, “nothing” or “completely” – were found to be better markers for mental health forums than either pronouns or negative emotion words.
From the outset, we predicted that those with depression will have a more black and white view of the world, and that this would manifest in their style of language. Compared to 19 different control forums (for example, Mumsnet and StudentRoom), the prevalence of absolutist words is approximately 50% greater in anxiety and depression forums, and approximately 80% greater for suicidal ideation forums.
Pronouns produced a similar distributional pattern as absolutist words across the forums, but the effect was smaller. By contrast, negative emotion words were paradoxically less prevalent in suicidal ideation forums than in anxiety and depression forums.
Our research also included recovery forums, where members who feel they have recovered from a depressive episode write positive and encouraging posts about their recovery. Here we found that negative emotion words were used at comparable levels to control forums, while positive emotion words were elevated by approximately 70%. Nevertheless, the prevalence of absolutist words remained significantly greater than that of controls, but slightly lower than in anxiety and depression forums.
Crucially, those who have previously had depressive symptoms are more likely to have them again. Therefore, their greater tendency for absolutist thinking, even when there are currently no symptoms of depression, is a sign that it may play a role in causing depressive episodes. The same effect is seen in use of pronouns, but not for negative emotion words.
Understanding the language of depression can help us understand the way those with symptoms of depression think, but it also has practical implications. Researchers are combining automated text analysis with machine learning (computers that can learn from experience without being programmed) to classify a variety of mental health conditions from natural language text samples such as blog posts.
Such classification is already outperforming that made by trained therapists. Importantly, machine learning classification will only improve as more data is provided and more sophisticated algorithms are developed. This goes beyond looking at the broad patterns of absolutism, negativity and pronouns already discussed. Work has begun on using computers to accurately identify increasingly specific subcategories of mental health problems – such as perfectionism, self-esteem problems and social anxiety.
That said, it is of course possible to use a language associated with depression without actually being depressed. Ultimately, it is how you feel over time that determines whether you are suffering. But as the World Health Organisation estimates that more than 300m people worldwide are now living with depression, an increase of more than 18% since 2005, having more tools available to spot the condition is certainly important to improve health and prevent tragic suicides such as those of Plath and Cobain.
By Mohammed Al-Mosaiwi, PhD Candidate in Psychology, University of Reading
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
As experts in political discourse and facial displays – how scientists often refer to facial expressions – we have analyzed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s five-hour Senate hearing on April 10. We looked at what kinds of questions senators asked and how Zuckerberg answered them.
What matters most in this kind of analysis is determining whether a person’s facial expressions are appropriate for what is being stated and whether their muscular movements reliably reflect their intentions.
While an individual may be smiling, that expression doesn’t always mean they are happy. They could be expressing sarcasm or politeness, depending on the context.
These facial clues can help viewers figure out whether a speaker – Zuckerberg in this case – is saying what he means. Zuckerberg was reserved but not impenetrable. His facial displays, while slight and subtle, were revealing.
Zuckerberg began his hearing with the senators by indicating he was not excited to be there.
Sen. Chuck Grassley opened the joint session by welcoming the CEO. During Grassley’s statements, Zuckerberg pulled the corners of his lips downward, a muscular movement associated with an encounter with something unpleasant. Even without a verbal response, we can already see Zuckerberg’s displeasure at sitting in front of the committee.
Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, complimented Zuckerberg by calling attention to his success, rhetorically asking if it could happen “only in America.” When Zuckerberg tried to tell the senator that there are successful Chinese tech companies, Sullivan jokingly told Zuckerberg that he is “supposed to answer yes to this question.”
In response, Zuckerberg gave an amused smile and laughed. Sullivan and much of the joint committee and the audience laughed too.
When laughing, the corners of Zuckerberg’s lips were pulled up and at an angle, the muscles around his eyes were contracted, and his jaw dropped.
The combination of these facial muscular movements show that a person is likely feeling amused. Between the jovial laughter shared between Zuckerberg and Sullivan, and Zuckerberg’s seemingly happy facial expression, he appears glad to be laughing at a comment at his own expense rather than taking hard questioning.
Some of Zuckerberg’s smiles were quite subtle throughout the hearing, but this smile indicated an exchange of humor.
Uncertain lip-pursing
Throughout the hearing, Zuckerberg is seen pursing and pulling his lips into his mouth, particularly when senators posed negatively framed questions.
Sen. Bill Nelson, a Democrat from Florida, asked about Zuckerberg’s accountability to the 87 million people whose information was breached by Cambridge Analytica, the incident which led to Zuckerberg’s appearance before Congress. The senator began with confrontational statements about Facebook’s “pattern of lax data practices” and asked Zuckerberg why Facebook hadn’t informed users about the breach when it happened.
Zuckerberg pushed his lower lip upward and both lips together. This suggests he was feeling vexed about Nelson’s statement that “the recent scandal is frustrating not only because it affected 87 million, but because it seems to be part of a pattern of lax data practices by the company going back years.” This indicated a degree of anger – either at the question, the breach or both.
Zuckerberg did not provide a complete reply to Nelson’s question. By not completely answering the question, Zuckerberg’s tells us he doesn’t want to supply Nelson with a straightforward answer. Instead, he described the process Facebook went through to punish the developer who sold users’ personal information to Cambridge Analytica.
This moment revealed how the question of accountability is still a touchy point for him.
