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Climate in My Mind

How does anxiety become an environmental relationship?

Why is absolutely everything in this supermarket wrapped in plastic? What if it rains so hard and long that the mountain collapses and buries my home? What is the actual carbon and chemical footprint of Israel’s ever-expanding, genocidal war? Will the white pine-lined coves and rocky tide pools that I love survive the warming in the Gulf of Maine? If the veld catches fire in Botswana, how will people escape? What if one day there are no more lemons?

Anxious thoughts and images of the environment loop ceaselessly through my mind—some drawn directly from Bong Joon Ho’s film, Snowpiercer—accompanied by a cascade of feelings. When it gets to be too much, I take a half a Xanax. It quiets the inside of my person, allowing me to tolerate what’s happening out there in the polycrisis.

I am not alone. Climate grief. Eco-anxiety. Solastalgia. The mental health community is proliferating new terms and new diagnoses to capture widespread feelings of nostalgia for a lost landscape, fear, outrage, and profound sadness about the environment. The human mind, it turns out, is a key climate interior. Americans like me often experience such feelings as internal, located in a mind inside a body that is yet another form of private property. What could be more interior, more private, than anxiety or despair, even if that despair is about the external environment? But, on closer examination, so-called “eco-emotions” are rooted in what sociologist Jackie Orr calls “psychopower.”1 In her book on panic disorder in the US, she showed how public feelings of anxiety and panic are cultivated as personal and attended to as pathologies at the confluence of pharma, state, and science.

“My Xanax is antipolitics, mediating the emergence of a collective political environment of ecological rage and despair. Shouldn’t I feel anxious about the environment?”

So, maybe I am internalizing what is rightly a public feeling. My Xanax is antipolitics, mediating the emergence of a collective political environment of ecological rage and despair. Shouldn’t I feel anxious about the environment? Shouldn’t I feel rage at how it manifests through fault lines of race and class, of political abandonment even as the profit-making continues? Shouldn’t I feel despair at our collective failure? Shouldn’t we all?

Xanax is Pfizer Pharmaceutical’s brand name for its most commonly prescribed benzodiazepine (now manufactured by Pfizer spin-off Viatris). With about fifteen million prescriptions annually, there are over three million Americans like me who rely on it with some regularity. And of course, Xanax is but one of many commonly consumed psychiatric medications. Nearly one in four Americans over the age of eighteen is taking a prescribed psychotropic drug, the culmination of a decades-long escalation in diagnostic creep and prescription response. The global market in psychopharmaceuticals had a projected value near $50 billion in 2020 and continues to rise.

So while I am grateful for the relief, turning to drugs to manage public feelings as private pathologies is both depoliticizing and widespread. And my turn to Xanax is not simply antipolitics. It is also a biochemical event, one that scales up through the external environment just like my feelings of anxiety and despair.

Following psychopharmaceuticals from production onward scrambles any clear separation between the exterior and interior environments of catastrophe—in a very material sense. People in the US have many reasons to be anxious besides the environment. Housing precarity and consumer debt abound, as does political abandonment. Children grow up with active shooter drills and the pressure to craft a public self. But whatever brings someone to seek relief in Xanax, the pill itself brings them into an environmental relationship.

Pharmaceutical production is a major global industry, and it is a dirty, loosely regulated one. Making drugs is more emissions-intensive than making automobiles. Now, a few leading pharma firms are making efforts to reduce carbon emissions in manufacturing (and greenwashing their profits by promoting those efforts). Yet the environmental impact of the drug industry goes far beyond just its carbon footprint.

Take Puerto Rico.2 There, despite protest from community groups, tax breaks to pharma totaling $14.5 billion annually (more than the Puerto Rican government’s operating budget) have helped make the island into the world’s third-largest biotech manufacturer. Currently, more than fifty pharmaceutical plants operate in Puerto Rico, producing a range of top-selling drugs for cancer, arthritis, heart disease, autoimmune disorders, and more, including psychopharmaceuticals like Prozac and Ativan, another benzodiazepine. Pharmaceutical manufacturing has produced fifteen EPA Superfund sites on the archipelago. Pharmaceutical runoff flows into freshwater systems feeding into the sea, where it has led to significant die-offs of fish stock in local waters, in turn hampering livelihoods. Toxic waste from the production process has also polluted the aquifer, tainting the well water that many rely on. This reliance became more acute in the wake of Hurricane Maria—itself a climate change catastrophe—which destroyed the island’s water system.

Even far from the site of production, the drugs we ingest in our internal environment find their way back out into the external one. As humans consume psychotropic drugs at escalating rates, we excrete these chemicals and their metabolites back into the environment, where they persist and accumulate over time. And it is not only humans. Antianxiety drugs grease the wheels of industrial meat production, sedating cows and pigs and sheep, so that the stress of the breeding pen or slaughterhouse doesn’t negatively impact the quality of their flesh. Animals, too, excrete the drugs and their metabolites back into the environment. Water treatment plants vary in quality and do not clear all these chemicals. Besides, on a day of heavy rain in New York City, where I live—the kind of day that is becoming more common—stormwater and wastewater mix and pour directly into the Hudson and East Rivers. The Xanax I take when the conditions in my inner environment become unbearable will find its way into the river and out to the Atlantic estuary, where it will be taken up by algae, phytoplankton, insects, mollusks, and fish.

Psychiatric drugs now abound in aquatic ecosystems, sedimented into sludge, soil, and the tissues of aquatic life. They are in the plankton that forms the foundation of the marine food chain; they are in the fish. Even in extremely low concentrations these drugs inhibit the stress response in fish, making them more aggressive, altering their feeding behavior. They affect the locomotor and reproductive systems of mollusks and crustaceans. In other words, efforts to blunt internal feelings through drugs have knock-on effects on the external environment that harm our fellow species on this planet—a grim irony.

The external environment also re-enters the internal one as these same drugs and their metabolites feed back into our own human biochemistry. They are in the sludge that becomes agricultural fertilizer. They are in the food we eat and the soil in which it grows. They are in our drinking water. In New York City, as elsewhere, trace amounts of antianxiety drugs, barbiturates, and mood stabilizers have been found in the tap water. One secondary analysis of pharmaceutical residue in drinking water in Europe and North America found that if a pregnant person drank an average of two liters of tap water per day, they would have a cumulative ingestion of five percent of a clinical dose of Valium (diazepam) over the course of the pregnancy.3 Public health authorities reassure us that these are very small concentrations, an order of magnitude below the therapeutic threshold, and that they pose no significant threat to human health. But the science that governs the dispensing of these drugs does not account for potential bioaccumulation in fish, exposure in utero, or other subclinical registers of accumulation or chronic exposure, much less how these chemical agents interact with one another. ⦿

  1. Jackie Orr, Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder (Duke University Press, 2006). ↩︎
  2. Alexa Dietrich, The Drug Company Next Door: Pollution, Jobs, and Community Health in Puerto Rico (New York University Press, 2013). ↩︎
  3. Abby C. Collier, “Pharmaceutical Contaminants in Potable Water: Potential Concerns for Pregnant Women and Children,” Eco Health 4, no. 2 (2007): 164–71. ↩︎