During a depressive episode in the summer of 2021, I attended “Big Gay,” a camping event north of Fresno where Bay Area lesbians congregated for a weekend of swimming and gossip. As I bobbed in an innertube on a marshy lake, I kept one eye on the jaundiced hills, watching for smoke. The Dixie Fire had just ignited in a nearby canyon, ripping through thousands of acres of fir and pine. Earlier that day, fire crews warned that the winds were unpredictable.
Back at the car, I had my emergency kit ready: four gallons of water, food for a week, a paper map of the San Joaquin Valley, an extra blanket and two weeks’ worth of antidepressants. In the Anthropocene, the ability to locate emergency exits is essential.
The conversation among the group floating in the lake quickly turned from bad dates and the depressing housing market to climate change and mental health. The future, we agreed, was decidedly bleak, especially in California. A couple confided that they were looking to buy land in the Southeast. Although neither had ever lived in the South, they seemed to prefer the possibility of flooding to wildfire, as if the decision could be reduced to a specific flavor of catastrophe. Another couple disclosed their anguish about whether or not to have children, citing carbon footprints. A woman with bleached hair piped up about her electric vehicle, to which another replied by pointing out the perils of neoliberalism and climate change. “You can’t buy your way out of this,” she snapped, spreading her hands wide. No one asked her to clarify what this was. Crumbling coral reefs? Disappearing wetlands? Climate refugees fleeing their homes, only to be turned away at the border? It didn’t matter; everyone knew what she meant.
“It’s terrifying,” I said.
The woman shook her head in disgust. “Terrifying doesn’t even begin to cover it,” she said.
IN A CLIMATE CRISIS, nothing is quite like you remembered it. Wildfires rip through millions of acres of California, transforming pine forests into charred skeletons. In my home state of Ohio, the changes are more subtle: Crabapples and lilacs bloom earlier; cicadas emerge weeks ahead of schedule; December calls for a rain jacket instead of a winter coat. This disorientation invokes Freud’s unheimlich — the “uncanny” — in which the familiar inevitably morphs into the unfamiliar, an intimacy turned rancid and raw. In 2007, Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined a new term for the feeling: “solastalgia,” the pain and distress caused by the loss of one’s environment.
Although the relationship between climate change and mental health is a relatively new field, it’s clear that the psychological effects of a warming world are worsening. Studies show that suicidal ideation, substance abuse, depressive episodes and reactive psychosis often increase following a climate disaster. Witnessing the destruction of your home, sleeping in shelters, lacking access to water and food — all of these stressors contribute to what psychologists call “ambiguous loss,” a phenomenon marked by uncertainty and a lack of closure. A 2020 poll by the American Psychiatric Association found that 67% of American adults were moderately to severely anxious about climate change. In younger generations, the impact is even more pronounced: According to a 2024 study published in The Lancet Planetary Health, 85% of Gen Zers are concerned about climate change. The weight of our increasingly unknowable, rapidly warming world is crushing.
In conversations with my own therapist, we’ve spent many hours discussing how climate change — like so many other things in my life — makes me feel out of control. As a chronically depressed person, I’m familiar with periods of dark thoughts, low energy and uncontrollable crying. Even so, climate grief has caused my already dangerously low serotonin levels to dip even further. The line between hyperawareness and paralysis blurs. I doomscroll through climate reports and obsessively check the daily air quality index. I call my political representatives and leave stumbling, pleading messages. When I walk my dog on unseasonably warm days and smell fragrant cherry blossoms that opened weeks too early, panic fills my chest like a dark bloom of spilled ink. If only I could file away the small details of the world with empirical stoicism. Instead, they pour into my bloodstream and attack the veil of my selfhood, leaving me cracked and porous.
My therapist suggested that I experiment with somatic exercises to focus on my body and escape the rattrap of my brain. “Tap right here with your two fingers,” he said, pointing to his heart. “It’ll bring you back into yourself.” Tap tap. Tap tap. The physical sensation helps me regulate my breathing. Sometimes I like to imagine I’m writing a message in Morse code to my future self, only I can’t decipher exactly what I’m trying to say to her yet.
Studies show that suicidal ideation, substance abuse, depressive episodes and reactive psychosis often increase following a climate disaster.
THE ECOLOGIST ALDO Leopold famously wrote: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” The line rings less true to me these days. Our warming world is full of wounds, but we are certainly not living alone in them. My depression actually brings me closer to all this collective pain. At a Halloween party a few years ago, I met a gruff young man who studied waterfowl migration patterns along the Pacific Flyway. He confessed that things were not looking good. Too much drought, too little water. He drained his beer and swallowed hard, pain rearranging the sharp angles of his face, then narrowed his eyes and took a half-step back, as if expecting a punch. I saw in him the sort of fear that inevitably arises from love. I recognized it immediately, and although we were strangers to each other, for one small moment I seemed to slip out from inside myself into the uncanny shadow of his climate grief. It mirrored my own. So you feel it, too, I thought. The interconnectedness of our grief was painful, but it was almost holy, too. The price of a depressed brain is that you cannot look away: not from the world, not from each other. But it is also a reward: A gift to feel so strongly.
I biked home from that party shortly afterwards, weaving in and out of the dark streets of Oakland. Even when burdened with amorphous grief, it was hard not to be moved by the silence of a city at night: The gingko trees glowed in the streetlights, and the air was damp with the promise of rain. As I pulled into my driveway, it began to drizzle for the first time in months. I stood still for a moment, immersed in so much relief I ached. I tapped my heart.
There’s a simplicity in mourning the world in this climate crisis; the evidence speaks for itself. Tap tap. The burden of grieving and loving our wounded world together, though, is more bearable. Perhaps it’s even a blessing.
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This article appeared in the July 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Finding community in a world of wounds.”
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