Measuring Eco-anxiety, or Not

"As human activities alter local-to-global environments, people are reporting stress, distress, depression, anxiety, worry, psychological trauma, and other negative emotions. Phrases coined to describe these responses include solastalgia, eco-anxiety, climate change anxiety, climate fear, and ecological grief. Scientifically, all these ideas are in their infancy. To improve understanding and to really get to the basics of how human beings respond to different environmental changes, researchers are developing scales and indices, some of which are clinical and some of which are not."

"One immediate question is the value of non-clinical quantification for mental health conditions, especially life-threatening ones such as anxiety, depression, and stress, all of which can affect physical health. Scientifically, this knowledge is important. To assist people in trouble, including prevention of and response to emotional trauma, debates continue regarding non-clinical labels that could be interpreted as diagnoses. A second issue then emerges: Defining "eco-anxiety" and its variations."

Human-caused environmental changes are producing a range of negative emotional responses, including stress, depression, anxiety, worry, psychological trauma, solastalgia, ecological grief, and climate-related fears. Scientific understanding of these responses remains nascent, and researchers are creating scales and indices—both clinical and non-clinical—to measure them. Debates persist about the value and risks of non-clinical quantification for serious mental health conditions that affect physical health and may be life-threatening. Challenges include defining terms like anxiety and distress, distinguishing clinical diagnoses from broader labels, and recognizing that efforts to define and quantify these phenomena may themselves influence reported experiences.

Read at Psychology Today