- But even outside of being directly effected, there is evidence that mere awareness of climate change can be detrimental to your mental health and wellbeing.
- If just knowing about climate change is emotionally difficult, what is it like spending years focusing on and writing about the topic?
What can a genre do?
Cli-fi has been touted as one of the ways to help save the world, with an emphasis on how imagining our future might make us reconsider our relationship to the natural world.
- Fictions in this genre have primarily imagined dystopian worlds where the very worst has happened and humanity is (often barely) surviving in flooded or desolate wastelands.
- These apocalyptic visions are meant to serve as warnings, to galvanise us to action, making sure this bleak future doesn’t happen.
- This seems a good idea in theory, but do dystopian fictions help us engage with the climate crisis?
Waking in the night
- Their responses made it clear that writing about a climate-changed future does more than bring up the anticipated negative emotions.
- Writers of climate fiction are often drawn to the genre because they are already thinking about the climate and feeling anxious.
- I had waking patches in the night over that time, where I’d be very intensely imagining something and grieving it […] But to be fair, I do that anyway.
- But many of the writers spoke of the writing process as helping, not exacerbating, their anxiety.
- We have to imagine ten years in the future and we have to imagine 50 years in the future.
Read more:
Writing can improve mental health – here's how
Theraputic benefits
- The mental health and wellbeing benefits of creative writing have been established.
- Studies have explored how writing can reduce anxiety in those affected by natural disasters.
- Yet, as the writers quoted here have shown, the imaginative process of crafting fictional narratives about difficult topics comes with its own benefits.
- In discussing their findings from one of the few studies to focus on the wellbeing effect of writing fictional narratives, Catherine Deveney and Patrick Lawson state: “it is in the craft of writing, the combination of technique and emotional catharsis, that some of the therapeutic benefits of writing can be found”.
- We need to shift from worrying about the effects of cli-fi texts to thinking about the benefits of writing creatively as we imagine our possible futures.
This research receives funding from Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. Alex Cothren and Amy T Matthews do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
