Schools must stop ‘teaching’ our kids the world is doomed

The education news outlet Chalkbeat recently highlighted a Denver, Colo. elementary school that’s teaching students as young as age 3 about environmental damage.

Mental-health professionals praise their efforts, saying the lessons can help prevent “eco-anxiety,” a “chronic fear of environmental doom.”

The mental-health industry’s logic is self-serving: Introduce kids to the idea of Earth’s demise, then step in to manage their worry.

Climate catastrophism has come to the classroom — and, as one educator put it, it’s “scaring the kids to death.”

Human beings aren’t born aware of our supposed environmental crisis.

The fear of climate change — and therapists’ capitalization on that fear — began with adults.

For several years, the American Psychological Association has published articles and warnings about the “significant mental health effects” of eco-anxiety, a pseudo-clinical “condition” it defined in 2017. 

Since then, therapists report mounting requests from clients for climate-anxiety treatment — though almost no evidence exist showing climate-specific treatments work.

Nevertheless, professional therapist organizations like the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America, the Climate Psychiatry Alliance and Climate & Mind have proliferated.

Hysteria has spread from the therapy couch to the classroom: Professionals now disseminate resources for addressing climate anxiety in schools. 

CASEL, a nonprofit pushing social-emotional learning — commoditized wellness curricula — has created tools detailing how schools can use climate-anxiety-specific SEL and promote “climate justice.”

The Climate Mental Health Network offers a “Climate Emotions Wheel” for the “important” purpose of “naming your climate emotions.”

Is demand for climate-anxiety services induced by the industry supplying them?

One therapist confessed to The New York Times that he feels compelled to bring up climate change when clients come in to talk about something else, and “seeding conversations with possible openings” to discuss the subject.

It’s not a stretch to think therapists are instilling climate anxiety in patients — mental-health professionals are not trained to keep their views out of their practice.

Chalkbeat reports that adults recently filled an early childhood conference session on eco-anxiety in part “because they feel anxious about climate change themselves.”

Psychology has a term for directing one’s own feelings toward another: transference.

Anecdotal evidence suggests well-meaning teachers drive at least some student distress.

One concerned parent said a teacher told her 12-year-old daughter that “by the time she’s 25 . . . she will not be able to show her kids certain parts of the ocean and there’s a lot of animals that are not going to be there.”

Cultural popularity and progressive approval are all the mental-health industry needs to turn a trending topic into a “disorder” that’s billable to treat.

Just slap the word “anxiety” after another noun — like “testing,” “performance” or “travel” — or claim the “condition” causes “pre-traumatic distress disorder,” which some mental health professionals use to describe the psychological effects of looming crises.

Manufactured disorders medicalize normal distress, which is genuine and unpleasant but an ordinary part of life.

Medicalizing such distress can impair functioning, turning the worried well into hopeless patients.

Indeed, one study finds climate anxiety can “induce eco-paralysis, thus leading individuals to avoid any form of engagement in actions against climate change.”

The APA’s own guidance doesn’t deny it: “Given the emotional weight of the topic,” a cited psychologist advises, “helping your patient take any action is a positive step . . . That can be as simple as taking a break from the news, or just putting their head on their pillow at night and saying, ‘Well, I tried my best today.’”

The warning also notes that “there are limits to personal responsibility,” and that “[f]or some, the solution might be taking less action.”

Of course, the APA warning does suggest seeking professional help, because therapists themselves are “‘totally appropriate’ for addressing climate change concerns,” as another mental-health practitioner adds.

It’s a self-fulfilling market for therapy, social-emotional learning and other commercially available “support” for kids to address problems that adults and the mental-health industry have in large part created.

Pathologizing fear, ironically, leads to environmental inaction.

In 2023 a national survey found half of Americans over age 18 “are fatalistic when it comes to climate change, believing that individual actions make no difference in changing its course,” according to the Hechinger Report.

Younger generations are especially pessimistic: Gen Z is reconsidering career and child-bearing plans due to “the health of the Earth.”

A climate group focused on resilience was founded after a Berkeley graduate student, hopeless about climate change, died by suicide.

Capable young leaders who could change the world’s direction are giving up.

The assumption that “more information about climate change automatically leads to pro-environmental behavior,” researchers Marie Lisa Kapeller and Georg Jäger caution, “is fundamentally flawed.”

Good stewardship of the Earth is well worth promoting.

But demoralized students won’t be motivated to save the environment.

Preventative treatment of “climate anxiety” is simply a counsel of despair.

Carolyn D. Gorman is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute. Adapted from City Journal.