Solastalgia: How Do Major Environmental Transformations Affect Us?
We currently live in a time of great changes. Humans and their societies have a great capacity to adapt. But what happens when these changes overcome us?
The extraordinary development of modern societies, contrary to what the term dematerialization of the economy might suggest, is only possible thanks to the consumption of material resources in astronomical and increasing quantities. This consumption allows our societies to continue developing their capacities to adapt and transform the environment. But we face a new challenge that leads us to have to allocate more and more resources to “fight” against the side effects caused by our consumption of resources, whether to access them physically, or due to the waste that is generated, or in the fight for control of its supply.
Thus, immersed in the “dematerialized” economy, fewer and fewer people can ignore this new reality. What happens when circumstances knock on your door and overwhelm your individual coping abilities? Due to the speed and magnitude of the changes that arise in our environment, whether in the form of climate change, rising energy prices, pandemics or wars,… there are many factors that make it difficult for us to continue considering our home as a place of life.
A few years ago, this phenomenon, named after name “solastalgia” We will see in a first part, to which set of emerging notions it belongs, and in a second part its personal predisposing factors, its causative factors, and its associated symptomatology studied to date.
The solastalgia It is part of a set of emerging concepts intended to describe and explain the implications on mental health and well-being of environmental changes in our living environments. (Galway, Beery, Jones-Casey, & Tasala, 2019). Among the emerging concepts that relate mental health and well-being with our environment we include:
He ecological pain defined by Cunsolo and Ellis (2018, p. 275) as “the pain felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including losses of significant species, ecosystems, and landscapes as a consequence of acute or chronic environmental changes.”
The eco-anxiety defined by Albrecht (2011, p. 49) as the “anxiety related to a changing and uncertain environment, while, for Clayton, Manning, Krygsman, and Speiser (2017, p. 68) eco-anxiety is the “chronic fear of environmental collapse“. nature deficit disorder, which is not a medical diagnosis according to Louv (2008), but a description of the growing gap between humans and nature, which has implications for health and well-being.
The echo-paralysis which Albrecht (2011, p. 50) defines as the inability to respond to climatic and ecological challenges, and which manifests itself as apathy, detachment, a disconnection from reality, an avoidance of the intractable nature of the problems, and the presence of dilemmas never before seen in the history of humanity.
The solastalgia which is the central concept of this article, is a recently created word. It was coined by Albrecht (2005). It is the conjunction of the Latin word “solace” consolation, with the Greek word “algia” pain.
He solastalgia concept It can be understood based on personal factors, causative factors and associated symptoms. The personal factors predisposing to the feeling of solastalgia are:
The “rootedness” to a place,
The “awareness” that this place of roots is being desolated in the present,
The “sense of belonging and identity” to that place of roots,
The feeling of “helplessness” or “injustice”,
The feeling of “distress.”
The articulation of these personal factors is done in the following way: the destruction, in the present time, of the home or surrounding environment produces the physical desolation of that environment. The awareness of these changes in turn erodes the feeling of identity and belonging to this specific place, and triggers feelings of psychological desolation and helplessness: solastalgia Hence, Albrecht also presents it as a form of nostalgia for a home in which one still lives, or as the pain experienced when one realizes that the place where one resides and loves is being destroyed (Albrecht 2005).
What causes solastalgia?
The causative factors of solastalgia They can be both natural and artificial: drought, fires, floods, war, terrorism, open pit mines, rapid institutional changes, gentrification of old city neighborhoods, deforestation, demolition of buildings, etc. Albrecht predicts a universal relevance of the concept of solastalgia in contexts where there is a direct experience of transformation or destruction of the environment.
Albrecht (2005) even maintains that solastalgia experience It would be possible for people who strongly sympathize with the idea that the earth as a planet is their home. These people could present solastalgia when witnessing events that destroy endemic identity (cultural and biological diversity) anywhere on earth. Along these lines, Doherty (2012) focuses on the branch of psychology called eco-psychology, which postulates that people’s mental health and well-being has to do with the idea that “the entire planet Earth matters.”
Finally, the symptoms associated with solastalgia According to Albrecht (2005), it could manifest itself individually or as a community, from a form of generalized anguish, to health and medical problems such as: drug use, physical illness, mental illness (depression, suicide) and psychosomatic illness. Since its coining, in general, the definition of the concept of solastalgia collected in the literature is that of the feeling of anguish that one feels when faced with the transformation or degradation of their home environment (Galway et al., 2019).
However, it is still a relatively new concept when it comes to relating environment, environment, health, and well-being, both in English (Galway et al., 2019) and Spanish scientific literature. To delve into the clinical/health reality of solastalgia, studies have been carried out that allow us to know real conditions in which the contextual aspects, the causative factors and the symptoms associated with solastalgia they manifest.
have been carried out studies on solastalgia in different countries and cultures: the majority in Australia, where it began to be investigated and disseminated (largely due to the work in which Albrecht, who is an Australian national, participates). We also found numerous studies carried out in the United States, and then studies carried out in Ghana, Canada, Colombia, Indonesia, Italy, etc.
It remains to be determined whether solastalgia It will come to be considered a full-fledged mental disorder, since at the moment it was presented as a new emotional disorder in different media, but it was not recognized as a mental illness through the medical channels of psychiatry (Mac Suibhne, 2009). In any case, the acceleration and magnitude of the transformations in our living conditions make solastalgia an increasingly useful framework of understanding when addressing and contextualizing, in consultation, psychological care in general.
