Marketing Fear

Marketing Fear

A while back, it was very fashionable to hear Democrats claim that Bush was "marketing fear" by making a big deal about the War on Terrorism. (It's not like there was any reason to be concerned, right?) So who is marketing fear when the psychiatric profession starts seeing this syndrome? From the February 9, 2009 Boston Globe:

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.

Actually, a stronger impact on our psyches than our world. The article goes on to repeat the global warming claims--with no recognition that a significant fraction of the world's scientists think those claims are at least overstated, unproven, or utterly false.