[Science Solitaire] Can a storm break your soul? Yes.

When my nephew, Gambit, started school many years ago, he told me about his classmate whom he said always “had a raincloud above her head following her wherever she goes.” When I probed further, I understood that he meant that she was always in a bad mood.  That was very funny to me then but when I now think about the actual violent rainclouds over all our heads as earthlings with the climate crisis, my soul shrinks from fear and sadness not just from the direct effects on our living spaces but on who we are and how we now behave as humans.  Yes, the climate crisis is also breaking our souls.

Even the WHO acknowledged that the effects of the climate crisis on mental health should always be part of our strategies to cope. They commended the Philippines for including mental health in their strategy as early as after Super Typhoon Haiyan in 2013 because even later, out of the 95 countries that the WHO surveyed in 2021, only nine have included it in their plans.

A 2020 study in Frontiers in Psychiatry that the climate crisis definitely has a mental impact and that it varies across geographies, depending on the severity, the timing, the frequency and the kind of resources available to them to cope. The same study also noted that there could be a time delay in the way we are affected by severe climate changes.

Even without these studies, our lived experiences, especially in our country that teethers between No. 2 or 3 in the World Climate Risk Index, we know that the effects of the climate crisis have been altering our own thresholds for many things including patience, resilience and loss. I was part of a panel in Berlin a few weeks who where we were asked to explore “futures” and I could not help but ask my Western colleagues that after slavery, colonization, deep inequities in world systems that they embedded and now the climate injustice, how much more resilient do they want us to be? Yes, we are angry but I think many of us are also tired of being angry.

The climate crisis has altered the spaces that humans depend on not only to be alive but also to feel alive. While the land, water, air – things we need to be alive- have been greatly compromised, the stories, the connections, the culture, the sentiment – tied to all those spaces have also been severed.  We now realize more than ever that we cannot separate our bodies from our souls – that the violent cloud over our heads washes over our minds as much as it does our other body parts and stuff we own.

In this Science Friday interview with experts who study the link between the climate crisis and mental health, Dr. Marshall Burke reiterated that the climate crisis is an “amplifier” of the existing problems we already have. He cited that they see the strongest signals of this amplification in extreme rainfall, typically dry, sometimes wet, but higher temperatures. He and his team found that hotter temperatures increases individual conflicts (assaults, homicides) but also civil conflict in many parts of the world.

In that same Science Friday interview, cognitive scientist and psychiatrist Dr. Yoko Nomura also revealed insights from studies that even babies who were still in the womb during a stressful climate event can suffer from trauma when they are born. She specifically studied the children who were in the womb when a Superstorm Sandy (2012) was raging. She found that the rate of disorder are two to three times higher than the general population which translates to “a five-fold increased risk for anxiety disorders and about 16-fold increased risk of depression and about four-fold increased risk of disruptive behavior disorders.”

We are only OK if nature could sustain the conditions fit for human lives. We forced nature to change, yet, we are shocked and even angry that it changed in ways that would make it difficult for us humans to BOTH be alive and feel alive.  Nature will find other ways to persist because it does not care if humans could not hack its way out of nature’s response to how we messed it up. But we care. We should care.  We only matter because we are alive and find ways to feel we are alive.

The climate crisis is as much a fight to fight for our souls as much as it is a struggle to keep our bodies and properties. – Rappler.com

Maria Isabel Garcia is a science writer. She has written two books, “Science Solitaire” and “Twenty One Grams of Spirit and Seven Ounces of Desire.” You can reach her at sciencesolitaire@gmail.com.