Mental health and climate change: the birth of eco-anxiety in the Spanish-language press

Abstract

In recent years we have witnessed a great deal of media interest in climate change, echoing the growing public concern about a complex phenomenon with daunting consequences. This pa­per examines the impact of concepts such as “eco-anxiety” and “solastal­gia” in the Spanish and Latin American written and digital press. These neolo­gisms attempt to explain the emotion­al effects of climate change on men­tal health. Between 2015 and 2019 the words “solastalgia” and “Nature Deficit Disorder (NDD)” slowly made their way into the media, until 2019, when the term “eco-anxiety” became relatively successful in the newspapers. In addition to analysing the factors in­volved in the birth and evolution of this concept, the study describes the most frequently cited emotions, such as fear, anguish, stress, sadness and guilt. The results obtained indicate, on the one hand, that eco-anxiety is still a vague idea and not very present in the media, too often linked to negative emotions, in contradiction of clinical psycholo­gy advice. Meanwhile, emotions such as anger or indignation, which would enable a collective response to climate change, are often neglected.