Links tagged “psychological”

Vice Mag: "Scientists are looking into what psychedelics do to inspire people to act pro-environmentally...After taking LSD, Bill stood in his kitchen in Merseyside, England, staring at a large tree. When the tree started to speak to him, Bill only found it strange that the tree didn't formally introduce itself, he told VICE in 2017. During the rest of their 15-minute chat, the tree clued Bill into the profound fact that all life on earth—plant, animal, and human—was intimately connected. "It was as if someone was inside my head judging my feelings, my thoughts, and my emotions," Bill said...

We’ve seen this before: In the 1960s and 1970s, frequent use of psychedelic drugs coincided with widespread environmental movements. Some propose that it’s not a coincidence that these things came about together. But proving that the drugs cause environmentalism is a tough claim to make, since perhaps the type of people who take psychedelics also happen to care about the environment...Psychedelics promote pro-environmental activity via a much-discussed phenomenon in the drug research world called ego dissolution...

Michael Pollan, the author of the recent exploration of the life-changing nature of psychedelics, How to Change Your Mind, acknowledged that psychedelic experiences could possibly address the “environmental crisis, born of our sense of distance from nature: our willingness to objectify nature and see it merely as a resource.” But he followed up with a dose of reality: “Then you need to stand back and say, ‘Wait, is it possible to prescribe a drug for an entire country?’” Psychedelics are still illegal, and not suitable for everyone—some people with a family history of psychosis could be at risk with these compounds.

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This has been proposed before: See: Human Engineering: Meet NYU Professor Matthew Liao, who yearns to bio-engineer smaller, drug-ready humans

Greta Thunberg at 2018 TED Talk on her climate worry: If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before? Why were there no restrictions? Why wasn't it made illegal? To me, that did not add up. It was too unreal. So when I was 11, I became ill. I fell into depression, I stopped talking, and I stopped eating. In two months, I lost about 10 kilos of weight. Later on, I was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, OCD and selective mutism. That basically means I only speak when I think it's necessary - now is one of those moments."

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Also see: New Claim: ‘Climate Despair’ Is Making People Give Up on Life

Greta Thunberg at 2018 TED Talk on her climate worry: If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before? Why were there no restrictions? Why wasn't it made illegal? To me, that did not add up. It was too unreal. So when I was 11, I became ill. I fell into depression, I stopped talking, and I stopped eating. In two months, I lost about 10 kilos of weight. Later on, I was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, OCD and selective mutism. That basically means I only speak when I think it's necessary - now is one of those moments." ...

"I think my anxiety just reached a peak," Ruttan Walker continued. It felt like there was nowhere to go, and although she had spoken to her primary care doctor about anxiety, she hadn't sought help with her mental health. Suddenly, she was contemplating self-harm. "Though I don't think I would have hurt myself, I didn't know how to live with the fear of... the apocalypse, I guess? My son was home with me and I had to call my friend over to watch him because I couldn't even look at him without breaking down," Ruttan Walker said. She eventually checked herself into an overnight mental health facility...

Maisy Rohrer, a 22-year-old developmental researcher at New York University, has been struggling to cope with climate change for years. "I guess the despair started when I was 18, and I began learning about how much the earth was changing, and I'd have full-blown panic attacks about the arctic sea ice melting, and the polar bears starving, and I'd call my mom telling her life was pointless," she said. She believed at the time that the human race "should be wiped out.""I became very suicidal, and a large part of my justification for feeling like I'd be better off dead was that humans are hurting the Earth so much, and I as one person [couldn't] make enough of a positive impact so it would be better if I were not around to cause any more damage," Rohrer said.

Dr. Aaron Brough of Utah State University is trying to get to the bottom of through his research. Brough co-authored a paper with professors from four other universities to understand how gender norms affect sustainable decision making. They report data from seven experiments that included over 2,000 participants from the US and China. What they found was remarkable.

They found that both men and women associated doing something good for the environment with being “more feminine.” And when men’s gender identity was threatened, they tried to reassert their masculinity through environmentally damaging choices. The report states that “men may be motivated to avoid or even oppose green behaviors in order to safeguard their gender identity.” This unearths a deeply held unconscious bias that Brough and team call the “Green-Feminine Stereotype.” ...

Exposing the fact that our society creates a toxic hierarchy around femininity as a lesser thing. Brough himself cited gender research around “gender incongruence” and the great penalties that men (and women) face when they don’t fit stereotypical gender norms.

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Watch: Mark Steyn reacts: Steyn said. “If I understand this thesis, my insecurities about my masculinity are causing rising sea levels in the Maldives. And at first I didn’t really buy that, but as I think about it, I think in fact it’s actually one of the least visible climate science thesis of recent years.

Psychology Today claims: 'Except for a small number of outliers (scientists), none doubt that we are rapidly approaching climate catastrophe.

'Millions of people share the phenomenon of climate denial...we are the victims of a well-funded and sophisticated misinformation campaign that attempts to keep us in the dark about climate change.'

The authors write at Psychology Today: 'We can affirm without doubt that anthropogenic climate change is a real phenomenon that is already apparent and will, if not mitigated, cause terrible suffering and destruction before this century is over.'

'What the climate scientists are telling us is that if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels the human race faces extinction. The fact is that many people born this year will not survive global warming if it continues at the current pace and exceeds 3.50C by 2050.' 

'Despite the fact that psychologists know a lot about denial, they have never had to face denial on this scale before. Millions of people share the phenomenon of climate denial. This is clearly not something that is amenable to individual or even group psychotherapy.'