American Imago

Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PreTSS) is but one of several mental health conditions being theorized in the humanities and social sciences as a result of climate change and the environmental desecration resulting from it. This turn to climate illness is important in the context of efforts to change course as regards the current petro-culture world, or at least to mitigate its impact on humans, non-humans, and the planet. It seems, as William Davies (2019) puts it in his work on declining democracy, that societies world-wide are moving from logic to emotion, from reason to feelings.¹ Interest in climate illness responds to such a situation in the sense that too much unconscious emotion may prevent publics from acting to remedy what is happening. Theoretically, if publics can understand the negative emotions and psychic conditions that prevent positive action, society can begin to confront the resistance to tackling what humans are doing to the biosphere. Indeed, it may be helpful to acknowledge that, given the situation, panicking may be appropriate. Further, as Heather Houser (2014), for one, has argued, creating narratives about humanity's dire condition might be more effective than gathering scientific facts and data, widely available already.²

Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, my focus here, is unlike most other mental health climate concepts—e.g. solastalgia (Albrecht), ecosickness (Houser), or Anthropocene disorder (Clark)—because, like ecophobia (Estok), it has a specific clinical reference. In my case it links to, but is different from, the familiar Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); it also differs from other climate illnesses in being focused on the future rather than the past or present.³ In what follows, I'll first look at what psychological research there is showing PreTSS as a disorder so as to assess its viability as a clinical diagnosis; I will [End Page 81] then address briefly how humanists (and film directors) represent PreTSS as a mental illness in climate change narratives. In both discussions, I raise issues to do with race and gender. Finally, 1) I'll ask why the status of official diagnosis matters; 2) explore whether other psychological research suggests climate trauma implicitly if not citing case studies; and 3) argue that while PreTSS might not be the best formulation, or verifiable by narrow scientific methods, what it stands for is useful in regard to affects and illness related to climate change.