(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The fact that it is not common to look for a connection between these two things has to do with the fact that those who work with environmental issues do not work with mental health – and vice versa. The time is ripe for the two areas of knowledge to cease to orient themselves separately from each other, and instead become aware of what makes nature and mental disorders a feature of one and the same social development.
The reasons stated for children and adolescents struggling more psychologically than before are linked to expectations of performance and achievement: It has to be successful – yes, perfect – in all arenas. Among those who feel that they are falling short, some are resorting to various forms of self-harm. Parents often do not know their poor advice; The problem barely existed in their own upbringing, and it is hard to imagine that a generation of young people in one of the world's richest countries, with a wealth of opportunities to choose from, are developing mental disorders to such an extent. Shouldn't this generation of young people be the most satisfied and future-optimistic ever?
At the same time as that the affected despair and the scholars explain why young people become mentally ill in one of the richest countries in the world, the news picture reminds us of the cost of our materially successful lifestyle: The aforementioned rainforest is halved; There are also, within 40 years, the number of wild animals in the world. Droughts and floods are destroying large areas in many countries on several continents, the glaciers are melting, and the birds – the half remaining – are increasingly full of plastic, as is the endangered polar bear of environmental toxins. In addition to the conflict-oriented political causes – the war in Syria – the refugee stream we are now seeing from the south to the north also has a climate dimension that will probably increase sharply in the coming decades.
Those who are young today are familiar with the environmental devastation, and many are worried about how the rainforest and polar bear will go. Will they disappear? Will today's young people become the generation to experience greater species death than any generation before they have done? At the same time, they realize that the adults who govern politics and business will continue with the current social model for the foreseeable future – as the Government's message for the Government navigates by illustrates, which suggests a tripling of consumption in Norway by the year 2050. Little indicates that we will be three times happier.
We have to do with two forms of destructive behavior: society's destruction of nature in the form of species extinction, overexploitation and depletion of resources, and individuals' practices of self-harm. The first collective, outward-looking and visible, with irreparable consequences for the ecosystems and species affected, so that young people are doomed to take over a severely wounded planet. The other is personal, introverted and hidden in the sense of shame because it is associated with the experience of lost value and status, and thus something that does not tolerate the insight of others. Where one form of destruction is considered the price we must pay for our material success, and as an expression of our superiority over all other species we share the globe with, the other form is a type of self-destruction we suspect has overindividual, societal causes, but without us fully perceiving them, let alone managing to prevent their pathological rash.
It is urgent to realize the following: The destruction is two sides of the same coin, the same model of society, in the same era. I do not thereby claim that they are directly in a causal context. But the simultaneity of the destruction warns that they must be put in contact with each other, both in terms of understanding and possible ways out.
Simultaneity consists in the fact that society, which in the course of more than 100 years has destroyed and / or used up more natural goods than in the entire previous history of mankind, in the form of predation on the "external nature" which we treat as a pure means for our purposes, is the same society that demands predation on the «inner nature» in the form of the individual's exploitation of himself as «human capital», as a performance-oriented student and later an employee.
If I'm right in that the predation on nature and the non-human forms of life take place in parallel with the individual predation on itself, in a situation where probably never is enough, neither in one area or the other, but where the elastic – the boundaries – must always be stretched a little more , and so on – why do we not see them as two sides of the same coin?
Those who are young today are familiar with the environmental damage, and many are worried about how things will go with the rainforest and the polar bear. Will they disappear?
The reasons why politicians and business people do not dwell on the context and the suffering it creates are obvious enough: The former would like to be re-elected for a new term, and the latter must think about the profits that the owners will be secured next quarter. The chorus of both is growth, always more growth, and the perspective correspondingly short-term: It is one's own longevity that applies. There is little talk that the bill that follows must be characterized as the generational egoism of the times.
However, there are also other reasons why the context I emphasize often remains unsaid. For my part, it started with me as a speaker taking the time to hesitate when the question came from the audience: Do you think it is going well?
I took it upon myself to check if there were children present, implicitly: someone who will not tolerate hearing an honest adult answer. What is this all about? Yes, that when we add up what we know from enlightened sources, with fact-based projections, there is much to suggest that we live in the last century with livable conditions for the people of the planet. It is a sentence I have written before, said before, but which practically never meets an answer.
Except for the child, then, that is, the one that we adults think (imagine) to want to spare. It is rather ourselves we want to spare, since we are the historically responsible generation rather than anyone. Children want to be taken seriously about the most serious of all: what kind of world they inherit, what kind of future they will have. If the adult perspective has not realized that a world more and more ribbed for birds, bears and the whole multitude – the miracle – of "natural" others, unlike human others, is a poorer world, one that is drained of sources of meaning and belonging, then the young are felt by it, on body and mind. The culture they are part of, however, is so human-centered and individualistic that it does not offer a language for eco-care, the pain of nature – all living things of which we are a part and which make up the total environment – thinned, bruised, laid waste, short said suffer, and that it is we who are to blame.
It is said that what you have not experienced, you will not be able to miss: The owl dad remembers, but which is not met here anymore; the notions of what is "normal" that change in step with lost nature, so that we get used to the most dangerous changes. That is only partially true. That the destruction of nature contributes to a lost quality of life for young people – "nature deficit disorder" – and that the loss of meaning that drives some of them to harm themselves, must be understood in light of the destruction of the living environment in the broadest sense so that an inward aggression is a response on an ongoing and structurally anchored exterior such, is not foreign to the youth. Although it is for so-called responsible adults. On the contrary, destruction dictates – more precisely: undermines – their generational conditions on Earth. And the destruction raises a question, one that for many takes the form of self-destructive despair, so that the protest is not understood as such, but only as personal pathology, ie as something strictly individual and biographical rather than socially: Why grow up when it comes to stepping in in a lifestyle that involves the destruction of their own living conditions – the outright destruction of a future there is reason to want to be a part of?
