Climate Crisis and Institutional Betrayal Inextricably Linked to Rising Mental Health Issues Among Children
August 26, 2024
Genesis v. EPA youth plaintiffs
Elizabeth Pinsky is the Associate Director at the Massachusetts General Center for Environment and Health and a child and adolescent psychiatrist and pediatrician. She also serves as a pro bono expert in Genesis v. EPA. The excerpt below is from her declaration filed on August 12, 2024, in support of the youth plaintiffs.
“Climate change is a mental health emergency for children. Current levels of increased temperatures from greenhouse gas pollution, and the climate consequences of that, are already posing significant threats and harming children’s physical and mental well-being. Further pollution and heating will exacerbate that already present harm to children. Conversely, fully accounting for children’s lives and accurately incorporating these costs into policy making could begin to alleviate these escalating harms.
Compared to adults, children have disproportionate exposure to many of the pathways through which climate impacts human health. Children spend more time outdoors, and are physically closer to the ground where particulate matter and other pollutants are measurably more concentrated. Children breathe at a faster rate and require more calories and more water per pound of body weight than adults, exposing them to proportionately higher levels of pollutants. Young children are also uniquely vulnerable to severe harm from infectious diseases spreading in range and seasonality as the climate warms, including Zika, malaria, and dengue.
Studies have demonstrated that children who experience severe weather events may suffer psychiatric symptoms that are more severe and of longer duration compared to adults.
Even children who have not directly experienced climate-related trauma increasingly experience impairing distress in the setting of exposure to climate change through news media, social media, and awareness about how climate change will affect the viability of their futures. This distress can manifest itself as fear, dread, despair, disaffection, rage, or grief and is sometimes referred to as “eco-anxiety.” It is important to note that “eco- anxiety” is not a mental illness, but a normative reaction to an imminent threat. Recent studies have shown a high prevalence of climate distress in young people, with related impact on their beliefs and feelings about their futures.
Though both adults and children can be affected by climate change, children are distinctly more vulnerable to life-long consequences for their physical and mental health in terms of both severity and duration.
Children raised with caretakers who do not care for their basic needs and safety, or who do so unpredictably, are at risk for derangements in attachment and a range of negative adult outcomes, including anxiety, depression, and interpersonal difficulties. A similar child/caregiver relationship can be applied on a population level for children and the adults in positions of power whose decision-making could, but does not, safeguard their wellbeing.
The failure by governments to respond to the climate crisis and to affirmatively contribute to it -- importantly as perceived by young people -- has been linked to climate distress in a study of 10,000 youth, suggesting that it is not just fear of climate change, but this fear in combination with the belief that adults collectively will not protect them, that contributes to distress. This collective harm has been referred to as “institutional betrayal.”
Children are also politically powerless, with no immediate control over the decisions that will impact their futures, contributing to a sense of helplessness in the face of institutional betrayal. These harms are amplified for children of color who are already vulnerable due to systems, or institutions, that have consistently perpetuated inequities in housing, education, health, and political power. Children, including Plaintiffs in this case, experience institutional betrayal by Defendants’ knowingly and intentionally abdicating their fundamental role to keep them safe, and instead intentionally value their lives as less than those of adults.
Because institutional betrayal is a distinct harm, children reap immediate benefits when government eliminates one source of trauma, like the discriminatory unequal or the mistreatment of children.
It is my expert opinion as a child and adolescent psychiatrist and pediatrician, and one of the nation's leading experts in the field of climate anxiety and trauma in our youngest populations, that removing discriminatory barriers to children accessing equal rights under the law, and attempting to secure equal privileges to live safely, to breathe clean air, to be free from extreme heat and other unnatural weather events, and at minimum to seek to prevent their worsening physical and mental health circumstances as climate pollution continues, is unquestionably meaningful for these children. Conversely, having courts deny their right to be heard and their rights and claims of harm to be considered is yet another institutional betrayal for the most politically powerless group of citizens in the country.
Read Pinsky's full declaration here.