Building Psychological Resilience: A Critical Response to the Mental Health Impacts of Climate Change

Climate change represents a critical global challenge with profound implications for mental health, necessitating a comprehensive understanding of its psychological impacts and potential mitigation strategies. This paper synthesizes current evidence to delineate the multifaceted pathways through which climate change affects psychological well-being, including elevated rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression, anxiety, and suicidality. Beyond these acute impacts, slower-onset processes such as economic disruption, displacement, and the degradation of environmental determinants of health contribute to chronic population-level distress. Concurrently, a distinct category of psychological responses, encompassing climate anxiety, solastalgia, and ecological grief, has emerged from the existential awareness of the escalating crisis, presenting as often debilitating yet non-pathological reactions to a genuine threat. In response to this complex challenge, this paper argues for a paradigm shift toward building psychological resilience, conceptualized as a multi-level capacity. It identifies key intervention pathways, including fostering self-efficacy to empower individual action and combat helplessness, strengthening community-led initiatives and social cohesion to reduce collective distress, and implementing robust public health and system-level strategies to ensure mental health service delivery during climate shocks. The findings reveal that protecting mental well-being amidst climate change is an urgent public health imperative, requiring the integration of psychological science into adaptation policy to transform vulnerability into proactive adaptation and collective resilience.

کلیدواژه ها:

Climate Change ، Mental Health ، Psychological Resilience ، Eco-anxiety.