Our Work Air Pollution New Daily: Burning anxiety–The new normal isn’t just the fire, it’s the fear

New Daily: Burning anxiety–The new normal isn’t just the fire, it’s the fear

Speaking to The New Daily, psychiatrist Dr Robert Llewellyn-Jones and Honorary Secretary Dr Richard Yin highlight that climate change impacts such as Australia’s unprecedented fires not only have direct physical impacts- they also affect our mental health. 

Dr Llewellyn-Jones states that these impacts will either act as a huge wake-up call and lead to significant changes, or it could go the other way: “If people get overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem, people could become fatalistic, or even worse, go into denial.” 

Dr Yin in 2018, published an article about ‘solastalgia–the phenomenon of seeing your home or a place you love lost through the destruction of the landscape– which was as relevant then as it is today.  

As journalists John Elder concludes about our climate-affected world: “the horror isn’t coming, it’s already here”.

First published in New Daily on 11 January 2010