Greta Thunberg Seen Through the Lens of Mental Health Ethics

Greta Thunberg, the world-famous climate activist, began to understand climate change aged eight, and perceived inaction and indifference. Devoid of a reason to live, she stopped eating and talked only when absolutely necessary. Sensitive to the disastrous consequences of climate change (Romanello et al. 2023) and distraught, her reaction is understandable: a life ahead, people around her with means to act, and not doing so. The world of her present and future is not one she would like, nor one she deserves.

Perhaps if we told a group of eight-year-olds about Greta and asked them to help her, they would come up with ideas to mitigate climate change and environmental disasters. We adults do not see—as Greta said in her 2019 address at the World Economic Forum—that ‘Our house is on fire’. What we do see, though, are her mental problems: Asperger’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder and selective mutism (Thunberg et al. 2020). Her seeing the climate crisis is compatible with receiving psychiatric diagnosis. But if you are emotionally affected by a serious collective problem, how could a psychiatric diagnosis help either you or the real problem at hand? Could it not instead lead us to overly pathologise mental states associated with legitimate contextual suffering, and shift the onus to changing individuals rather than changing environments (Henritze et al. 2023)?

Years later, Greta started her famous Fridays for Future, a proposed school climate strike. Other people started to join her and her movement grew into a reference point for climate change activism. Greta recently explained that many people in Fridays for Future have a diagnosis on the autistic spectrum and joined the movement because they could not pretend that nothing was happening, and were vocal about change. She also says that many, like her, found a way to be part of the solution through activism, finding purpose, hope and a community with shared values.

Stories like Greta’s can illuminate how we understand and respond to mental distress. We need mental health ethics to better our approach before our mental health services become redundant since ‘there is no mental health on a dying planet’ (Gadsby 2019). We need psychiatric diagnoses, but not those that ignore the context of our lives in which mental suffering takes place (Henritze et al. 2023). We need treatments for mental illness, but not those that neutralise us in order to not perceive and change reality. The social model of disability underlines the obstacles that society’s organisation can represent for a person’s functioning (Oliver 2013). By analogy, mental health ethics reminds us to be critical of decontextualised diagnosis and encourages us to shape a community-based therapeutic approach that takes into account the uniqueness of each person and the pursuit of collective purpose.

Data Availability Statement

The authors have nothing to report.