Eco-Anxiety Rising

The mental health effects of climate change and other ecological crises have become the object of intense public concern, giving rise to wide-ranging academic and popular debates over “eco-anxiety” and “climate anxiety.” This book offers the first extended sociological analysis of the phenomenon of eco-anxiety, engaging critically with the varied and ongoing claims-making activities through which it has been constructed as an urgent social problem.

Arguing that a critical sociological perspective can shed new light upon the complex social and cultural influences feeding into the alleged “epidemic” of eco-anxiety, Soron adopts a constructionist approach to eco-anxiety that highlights the processes by which this putative condition has come to be framed as a crisis demanding a concerted collective response. Addressing key gaps and tensions within eco-anxiety discourse, this book addresses the ways in which expressions of distress over mounting environmental crises, and the various political claims that flow from them, are being shaped though the highly specific idiom of therapeutic culture.

Without disputing the legitimacy of popular concerns over an environmentally uncertain future, Eco-Anxiety Rising brings debates over eco-anxiety and climate anxiety into an extended dialogue with the emergent literature on therapeutic culture and the sociology of social problems, seeking to contextualize and engage critically with a problem that has been discussed primarily from a psychological or medical vantage point.