Relationships between climate change distress, generalized anxiety, and climate-related symptoms of mental disorders

ABSTRACT

Background and Objective:

We examined the possibility that reactions to climate change take two forms: distress, which may be adaptive, and symptoms of mental disorders, which may not be.

Design and Method:

In a national sample of Polish adults (n = 1133), we measured climate change distress (experiencing unpleasant emotions and feelings due to climate change), climate-related symptoms of mental disorders (e.g., problems sleeping and problems working and planning), generalized anxiety, and depression.

Results:

Zero-inflated Poisson regression analyses of the occurrence of climate-related symptoms of mental disorders found two latent classes: People who experienced symptoms of the disorder and those who did not. For all eight symptoms, climate change distress predicted membership in the latent class of people who experienced a symptom, whereas how often people in the non-zero latent class experienced each symptom was positively related to generalized anxiety but was not related to distress or depression.

Conclusions:

These results suggest that reactions to climate change take two forms. Some people do not experience climate change-related symptoms of mental disorders, and some do. People who experience symptoms have higher levels of climate change distress, and the frequency with which they experience these symptoms is determined by their dispositional, generalized anxiety.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change distress
• generalized anxiety
• depression
• anxiety
• mental disorder

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that were analyzed in this paper are available via the Open Science Foundation repository: https://osf.io/s8myg/?view_only=1a8ddcd3132c4629b8b792d31ad55e05.

Notes

1 The results of analyses of the original sample of 1320 were functionally equivalent to the results we present in this paper. All effects that we report as significant were significant in the analyses of the original sample, and all the coefficients that were not significant in the analyses we report were not significant in the analyses of the original sample. Moreover, the sizes of the coefficients in the two sets of analyses were very similar.

Additional information

Funding

The research described in this paper was supported by a grant from SWPS University.