Fearmongering Takes a Toll: More Suffering From 'Climate Change Delusion'

Of course by reading this story, it will just continue the delusion. The entire piece looks as if it were written by Al Gore or some such alarmist. It simply repeats as fact all the dire prognostication that has already driven skulls full of mush over the edge with anxiety.

Last year, an anxious, depressed 17-year-old boy was admitted to the psychiatric unit at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne. He was refusing to drink water. Worried about drought related to climate change, the young man was convinced that if he drank, millions of people would die. The Australian doctors wrote the case up as the first known instance of "climate change delusion."

Robert Salo, the psychiatrist who runs the inpatient unit where the boy was treated, has now seen several more patients with psychosis or anxiety disorders focused on climate change, as well as children who are having nightmares about global-warming-related natural disasters.

Such anxiety over current events is not a new phenomenon. Worries about contemporary threats, such as nuclear war or AIDS, have historically been woven into the mental illnesses of each generation. But global warming could have a broader and deeper effect on mental health, even if indirectly.

"Climate change could have a real impact on our psyches," says Paul Epstein, the associate director for the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.

Over this century, the average global temperature is expected to rise between 1 degrees and 6 degrees Celsius. Glaciers will melt, seas will rise, extremes in precipitation will occur, according to scientists' predictions.

Therein lies the problem. Keep repeating these dire prognostications with no basis in fact and eventually enough people will go nuts.

Stay sane, ignore the extremists. Those who are brainwashing schoolkids with this nonsense should be considered child abusers.