Speaking to The New Daily, psychiatrist Dr Robert Llewellyn-Jones and Honorary Secretary Dr Richard Yin highlight that climate change impacts such as Australia's unprecedented fires not only have direct physical impacts- they also affect our mental health.
Dr Llewellyn-Jones states that these impacts will either act as a huge wake-up call and lead to significant changes, or it could go the other way: "If people get overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem, people could become fatalistic, or even worse, go into denial.”
Dr Yin in 2018, published an article about ‘solastalgia--the phenomenon of seeing your home or a place you love lost through the destruction of the landscape-- which was as relevant then as it is today.
As journalists John Elder concludes about our climate-affected world: "the horror isn’t coming, it’s already here".
First published in New Daily on 11 January 2010
Photo by Ethan Sykes on Unsplash