**4.2 Mental health**

'Mental health' is a diffuse construct. Understandings of mental health therefore have, at least, a historico-cultural dimension if not are entirely context dependent. It follows that 'mental health' will be formulated differently in, say, a context where reliable social organization has broken down – think of the dystopian world depicted in Cormac McCarthy's *The Road* [17] – compared to the definition that is in-play in an ordered, compassionate milieu. This difference noted, no one is an island. To a degree, climate collapse will have an impact on every person's mental health, hubristic assertions of autonomy notwithstanding,

This degree will be regulated by several factors not least of which is location. If one lives on low-lying ground in Bangladesh, or is a farmer in the mid-west corn-belt in the USA, one's mental health will tend to be more affected by climate collapse. More generally, those who live anywhere that is qualitatively impacted by sea level rise, storms, droughts or fires or, at a different level, are impacted by the migration pressures and food shortages that will accompany these effects, will tend to experience a heightened impact on their mental health. In contrast, those whose exposure to the material effects of climate collapse is less severe will tend to face less hazard. The nature of variables noted, if the relevant principles of decision are applied a limited set of generalizations can be put forward.

If left untrammeled, at a social level fear and blame, grief and helplessness, will fuse to form a febrile emotional atmosphere. Depression and anxiety, like anhedonia, will be stoked. It is logical to expect that keeping one's bearings in such a fraught situation will be a serious challenge. This scenario puts the consideration of 'mental health' into compelling relief. Several scenarios arise.

Confronted by climate collapse, bourgeois psychology and neo-liberal ideology will conjointly advocate that the self should be militarized: personal boundaries need to be strengthened, feelings cauterized, behaviors should be strategic, and so forth. Simply put, the attractive error will be to become more amoral and more repressed.

Like the trajectory human kind has furthered in its relationships with nature over the last 200 years – strip mine; stand apart from; be heedless of the longer term impact of one's actions – being 'more amoral and more repressed' is exactly what Wilhelm Reich saw as increasingly characteristic of human socialization in the so-called advanced economies nearly a 100 years ago. Thicken the character armor, augment muscular rigidities, mobilize the defenses [18]. In this movement the face comes to be hide-bound, an immobile exo-skeleton that should show no emotion. Alarmed and armed, bunkered in a hunter's cave, the eyes of the repressed are not a window to the soul but are an impersonal instrument that is on the look-out for danger or opportunity.

The half-way point, the situation we are in now, is that the industry that has been set up to care for the mental health of citizens is miscarrying its purpose. Rather than steadying, it is overheating the appetites of its potential and actual customers. *You are not feeling positive? That is a sure sign you have a mental health issue!*

In simple terms, if the industry continues to pathologize the ups-and-downs of inner life, if the fashion to be ego-centric remains a constant or, even worse, if this trend strengthens, this will dramatically predispose the population to have 'mental health problems' even before the consequences of living on a darkening planet are materially realized. What is created in this scenario is a pyro-cumulonimbus psychic cloud. The self-care imperative, the i-me-my-mine hot-house, generates the lightning and strong winds that ignite, and spread, more fire.

Like a dog chasing its tail, this is a path to pathology not mental health. The alternative is to greet the honest child in each of us and reach towards affinity and ethical relationships. This idea is explored below.
