Van Susteren, Lise, MD

There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON, author of Dust Tracks on a Road

Some people suffer from symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)with worry, disturbing and intrusive thoughts, hyperreactivity, hypervigilance, grief, sleep problems, and nightmares-but in this case the symptoms stem not from a traumatic event or series of events but from how it feels to live in today's world and from anxiety about what it could be like in the future.

With the threats and worries swirling around us becoming so pervasive- overwhelming, really-our culture has recently coined terms for new forms of fatigue or depletion, including outrage fatigue, evacuation fatigue, scandal fatigue, compassion fatigue, racial battle fatigue, apocalypse fatigue, and eco-anxiety. Recently, the term solastalgia, coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe the distress of seeing treasured land permanently damaged by industrial activity or extreme weather events, has entered the cultural lexicon, particularly in the mental health field and environmental activism community.

More and more these days, people are asking, What can I do about the psychological turmoil that I'm feeling? How can I feel safe and steady myself again? How can I respond to triggers more effectively? These questions reflect the deepening emotional toll of anxiety, fear, outrage, anger, and sorrow-of a society under stress. It doesn't have to be this way.