Post Climatic Stress Disorder - Climate Psychology

Friends did a month of rain that fall last night? Did rivers flood in the Fall? Did you know 214 all-time heat records were set in the U.S. September 24th?

It was 30 degrees in Toronto, feeling like 37 with the humidity - the heat of the human body. And just lately, Los Angeles hit an all-time high of 113 degrees - in late September!

Worried about your kids?

You might have Post Climatic Stress Disorder. PCSD is a serious condition. But don't worry, professional help is on the way....

This week on Radio Ecoshock, it's Climate psychology 101 - with psychologists Robert Griffin and Joseph Reser. Plus new film on the grand-daddy of the double bind, Gregory Bateson.

How does that make you feel?

What if humans are not capable of conceiving a slow-moving global problem. Maybe, we do not have the mental equipment to "see" climate change. If that were so, we may go extinct, due to a disability in our minds - and evolution works too slowly to fix such things. Do we have what it takes? Are we too stupid or psychologically challenged to survive?

BUT FIRST, MY OWN PSYCHOLOGICAL WORK: ALEX GET'S PUBLISHED....

Before I get into the debate and our guests - my own article on controversial psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich was published this Summer in the literary journal "The Centacle." Just click on the cover to get an Adobe .pdf file of this issue. "Wilhelm Reich, The Life and Death of a Social Pioneer" opens the issue.

My thanks to Raymond and his wife - of SpiritPlants Radio! - for patiently transcribing from my reading of this piece, buried on the Radio Ecoshock web site. I wrote it years ago, and then lost the printed version. Better to read it than listen, because as my first recording, I sound like an answering machine. It took me a while to find my radio voice.

Wilhelm Reich began the sexual revolution, and worked for a woman's rights to her own body, decades before the 1960's made it fashionable. He was heir apparent to Sigmund Freud, until his radical views got him kicked out of the Psychoanalytic Association, and Austria/Germany (thus saving his life from Hitler's goons).

But free thinking was no better loved in America, where Reich was among the first to criticize the radiation from nuclear weapons testing. For that, his earlier Communism (it was the McCarthy witch-hunt days), and his medical claims about "Orgone Energy" - the U.S. government arrested Reich and jailed him. This social pioneer died in American prison. Worse, in an under-reported example of American book-burning - the authorities burned all of his books- ironically including the classic "The Mass Psychology of Fascism". Read it and weep.

But on to our show on the psychology of climate change.

READ MORE (with notes on our guests, links to new climate psychology reports and audio - a re-think of how we approach the climate crisis....)