U.K. Government Identifies Climate Change as Significant Threat to Mental Health, Recommends Yoga as a Fix

The United Kingdom Health Security Agency released a report identifying anxiety about climate change as a significant driver of mental-health problems among young people. But instead of counseling politicians and activists to tone down their rhetoric, the report casts climate alarmism as a reasonable response to real-world conditions and prescribes solutions like yoga and so-called climate cafes to help alleviate the stress.

The “Climate change and mental health: thematic assessment,” released last week, describes climate change as “one of the most significant threats to health security and societal wellbeing.”

The authors go on to describe the novel mental health disorders, complete with formal names, that have emerged in young people in response to that dire reality.

“An awareness of climate and environmental change can also lead to emotional or psychological responses, such as eco-anxiety, a term used to describe the distress and worry caused by the threat of climate change, and solastalgia, which refers to the distress experienced as a result of environmental change (including climate change) negatively impacting on someone’s home or sense of place.”

Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute, told National Review that the U.K. report shows how left-wing ideas about climate change and its effect on the population have migrated from the fringes of academia to official government policy.

“The UK’s embrace of fringe terms like ‘eco-anxiety’ and ‘solastalgia’ shows how deeply climate propaganda has seeped into official policy. These are not medical conditions, they are the predictable result of years of fear based messaging that tells people to feel guilty about prosperity, children, and modern life,” Isaac said in a statement.

The U.K. has embraced alternative energy sources in an effort to move away from fossil fuels. Successive U.K. governments have pledged to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The current labor government has committed to ending the sale of new gas-powered cars and trucks by 2030 and powering the entire electric grid using alternative energy sources like wind and solar, also by 2030.

Yet despite these efforts, the report notes that young people in the U.K. and Australia are increasingly citing climate change anxiety as a factor in their decision not to have children.

“There is evidence that eco-anxiety is influencing reproductive choices for some individuals, as 39% of UK survey respondents described that climate change made them feel hesitant to have children due to concerns over the children’s future quality of life, and therapists in Australia have seen an increased number of people acknowledging that climate change is impacting their mental health and wellbeing and contributing to uncertainty over their future family planning due to future safety and resources,” the report reads.

The report’s authors cast this “reproductive guilt” as a rational response to climate change.

“It must be noted that changes in reproductive choices can be an adaptive and rational response to environmental factors, but that these decisions can be associated with feelings of pressure and guilt and therefore should be navigated with appropriate support and information.”

When asked whether the report’s authors considered the possibility that overheated rhetoric might be contributing to mental health problems, UKHSA directed National Review to a press release.

The report argues that the best way to combat “eco-anxiety” is by “building resilience” through group-based activities, which, according to their research, will lessen the impact of climate change on mental health.

“Participating in group and community-based activities, including yoga, citizen science, and climate cafés, was associated with reduced psychological distress and helped people process climate-related emotions through shared experience and support,” the report explains.

“Climate change is a primary context in which health (including mental health) will need to be protected by governments as well as health and social care organisations now and in future, requiring continuous adaptation as climate change progresses,” the report reads. “As such, climate change and mental health can be considered as 2 substantial and overlapping health crises.”

Prominent climate activists, such as Bill Gates, recently took a step away from pushing climate alarmism. In a recent essay published by Gates, he expressed that while he believes climate change and global warming are both issues, they “will not lead to humanity’s demise.”

Gates emphasized the need to focus on other issues, like disease prevention and hunger, shifting the investment from expensive and often unsuccessful efforts to quell climate change to more tangible issues.

“Now the same activists who manufactured this panic claim the cure is a forced green energy transition that would make society poorer and less secure,” Isaac said. “No climate café or government program will solve a mental health crisis created by the Left’s own apocalyptic narrative.”