Psychologists now have a name for Larsen's condition: eco-anxiety, the overwhelming and sometimes debilitating concern for the worsening state of the environment. As signs of global warming accumulate, therapists say they're seeing more and more patients with eco-anxious symptoms. Sufferers feel depression, hopelessness and insomnia, and go through sudden, uncontrollable bouts of sobbing. They're overwrought about where the polar bears will live if they lose their habitat. They fret about the Earth running out of fossil fuels and about the slow disappearance of the oceans' coral reefs. Sometimes, the worry is closer to home, about the loss of songbirds in the backyard or the fate of the squirrels after a neighborhood park was bulldozed for condominiums.
Good Lord, are these people dressing themselves in the morning without assistance and are they allowed to handle sharp objects?
And more importantly, shouldn't their neuroses be treated by medication and not socialist economies that cripple economic growth for everyone in the name of soothing their anxiety?
Why should crazy people have the default starting position for debating the issue?
