Mental health professionals have long understood that external stressors—job loss, relationship problems, financial strain—can trigger psychological distress. Yet an emerging body of research suggests that clinicians may be overlooking a significant environmental source of patient suffering: the degradation or transformation of the physical landscapes that surround them. This phenomenon, termed solastalgia, represents a form of psychological distress that occurs when people witness unwanted environmental changes in places they call home while still residing there.
For American mental health providers, understanding solastalgia has become increasingly relevant as communities across the country grapple with wildfires, hurricanes, floods, prolonged droughts, and industrial environmental changes. The term blends Latin and Greek roots—solace and nostalgia—to describe what philosopher Glenn Albrecht called the experience of being homesick while still at home, as familiar environments transform in distressing ways.
The Clinical Picture: More Than Nostalgia
Unlike nostalgia, which involves longing for a place from which one has been separated, solastalgia describes distress that arises when environmental changes impact people who remain directly connected to their home environment. The distinction matters clinically because the mechanisms and interventions may differ significantly.
Recent research has begun quantifying this connection between environmental distress and mental health outcomes. A scoping review examining studies from 2003 through 2024 found consistent positive associations between solastalgia and depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and somatization. The correlations were not trivial. One United States study found that each one-point increase on a solastalgia scale corresponded to a 26 percent increase in the odds of experiencing psychological distress.
The research reveals an important pattern: associations between solastalgia and mental health problems appeared stronger in contexts of prolonged environmental destruction compared to single-event disasters. This suggests that chronic exposure to ongoing environmental degradation may pose particular psychological risks—a finding with significant implications for communities facing sustained climate-related changes or long-term industrial activities.
Who Experiences Solastalgia?
While anyone can experience distress from environmental changes, research has identified populations at heightened risk. Communities whose livelihoods are closely tied to their environment appear more vulnerable to solastalgia than those with less direct environmental dependence. This includes agricultural communities, fishing populations, and Indigenous groups with deep ancestral connections to their land.
Socioeconomic factors also play a role. Research conducted in the western United States following a destructive wildfire found that higher-income families experienced significantly less solastalgia than lower-income neighbors. The likely explanation is straightforward: wealth provides options. Affluent families could relocate or rebuild more easily, while those with fewer financial resources faced greater uncertainty and reduced control over their circumstances.
The concept has been documented across diverse American contexts. Researchers have identified solastalgia in coal-mining regions of Appalachia, and after the Wallow Fire in Arizona, where the gap between wealthy and poor residents’ experiences was particularly pronounced. One year following the Wallow Fire, researchers found that higher solastalgia scores and adverse financial impacts from the fire were associated with clinically significant psychological distress.
Theoretical Mechanisms: Why Environment Affects Mental Health
Understanding the psychological mechanisms underlying solastalgia can inform clinical approaches. One compelling explanation draws on learned helplessness theory, which posits that depressive symptoms emerge from perceived loss of control and resulting powerlessness. Environmental changes often lie beyond individual control—people cannot single-handedly reverse climate change, prevent industrial development, or stop natural disasters—creating conditions ripe for helplessness.
The deep connection certain communities maintain with their environment provides another explanatory pathway. When landscapes that have provided stability, security, and identity undergo dramatic transformation, the loss reverberates through multiple dimensions of wellbeing. For communities with place-based cultural practices, environmental degradation can simultaneously threaten economic livelihood, cultural continuity, and psychological security.
Qualitative research provides further evidence that solastalgia constitutes a useful framework for understanding emotional responses to environmental change, including pessimism and lowered resilience. These findings align with broader literature demonstrating links between environmental distress and mental health problems.
Assessment and Recognition in Clinical Settings
Several validated instruments now exist for measuring solastalgia. These include the Environmental Distress Scale, the Scale of Solastalgia, and the Brief Solastalgia Scale. While routine screening may not be necessary for all patients, these tools could prove valuable when environmental factors appear relevant to presenting concerns.
Susanne Fischer, who worked on the recent scoping review, suggests that mental health professionals might be well advised to ask more about natural environmental factors as they relate to mental health, much as clinicians routinely inquire about social environment—family, friends, partners, and other significant relationships.
While solastalgia is not formally recognized as a mental health condition, the Climate Psychiatry Alliance uses the concept to train clinicians on place-based grief and lists it among key climate emotions. This acknowledgment by professional organizations suggests growing recognition of environmental factors in mental health assessment and treatment.
Practically speaking, providers might consider environmental factors when patients present with depression or anxiety that seems connected to their living environment. Questions about recent environmental changes in their community, concerns about future environmental conditions, or feelings about landscape transformations could reveal underlying solastalgic distress that might otherwise remain unexplored.
Clinical Implications and Interventions
The question of how to treat solastalgia-related mental health problems remains open. Should causality be established through future research, one suggestion for clinical innovation is evaluating whether individuals experiencing solastalgia-induced mental health problems respond to conventional methods used for grief disorders, depression, or anxiety, or whether specialized approaches are necessary.
Fischer suggests that clinicians might want to discuss coping strategies for someone living in an area affected by environmental damage, while noting that spending time in nature is a powerful resource for many people and could be emphasized and utilized more in treatment. This recommendation raises an interesting tension: when the problem is environmental degradation, can nature-based interventions still help?
The answer may depend on what remains available. Even in areas experiencing environmental change, pockets of relatively intact nature may still provide therapeutic benefit. Additionally, involvement in environmental restoration or conservation activities might address both the psychological need for agency and the environmental source of distress.
From a therapeutic perspective, there is an argument that personal wellbeing and environmental conservation may be simultaneously pursued through active engagement with the natural world. This suggests potential value in eco-projects that combine clinical effectiveness with community environmental improvement.
One approach involves identifying an individual’s specific eco-emotions and addressing them accordingly—for instance, someone experiencing high levels of ecological grief might find that restoring or conserving nature helps regulate these emotions and prevent mental health problems.
Broader Context: Solastalgia Among Eco-Emotions
Solastalgia represents one of several eco-emotions—including eco-anxiety, eco-grief, and eco-shame or guilt—that may be important in explaining mental health problems arising from ecological crises. Understanding these distinctions matters for accurate assessment and appropriate intervention.
A key distinction can be made between solastalgia as the lived experience of negatively perceived change in the present, and eco-anxiety linked to worry or concern about what may happen in the future. A patient might experience both simultaneously—distress about current environmental changes in their community plus anxiety about anticipated future deterioration—but the temporal orientation differs.
Research has expanded the concept to include anticipatory dimensions. Recent work has examined whether people endorse an anticipatory form of solastalgia—current distress about expected future changes to the environment—finding that younger people and those with more liberal political orientations reported higher anticipatory solastalgia in American samples.
Limitations and Cultural Considerations
The concept of solastalgia originated in Western paradigms, specifically in Australia’s Upper Hunter Valley, and whether it effectively reflects experiences across global communities remains debated. American providers should be mindful that validated measures were developed primarily in Western contexts and may not capture the full range of environmental distress experiences in diverse cultural communities.
The evidence base, while growing, remains limited in important ways. All identified quantitative studies employed cross-sectional designs, which limits causal inference—researchers cannot yet determine whether solastalgia precedes mental health problems, whether mental health problems increase vulnerability to experiencing solastalgia, or whether third factors influence both simultaneously.
Practical applications of solastalgia research have been generally overlooked, and how to integrate solastalgia into clinical settings remains unclear and will require further theoretical development in addition to validated scales.
A Call for Expanded Assessment
The research on solastalgia challenges mental health providers to expand their understanding of what influences patient wellbeing. For decades, the field has recognized that social determinants—housing, employment, education, social connections—significantly impact mental health. The solastalgia literature suggests that environmental determinants deserve similar attention.
Recent commentary in Nature Mental Health describes solastalgia as a potentially critical construct that may serve as an early warning signal indicating that emotional systems, much like ecological systems, are approaching critical thresholds. If this proves accurate, identifying solastalgia in affected patients could create opportunities for earlier intervention.
Solastalgia can be seen as a valuable concept for assessing mental health risks among populations exposed to environmental change, and while it represents a rational response to environmental change, it appears correlated with worse mental health. This framing is important: experiencing distress about environmental degradation is not pathological in itself, yet it carries mental health implications that clinicians should not ignore.
As climate change continues altering American landscapes—through increased wildfire activity in the West, more intense hurricanes along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, changing agricultural conditions in the Midwest, and rising seas threatening coastal communities—the number of patients affected by environmental distress will likely grow. Mental health providers who understand solastalgia and related concepts will be better positioned to recognize, validate, and address this emerging source of psychological suffering.
The conversation about solastalgia in clinical settings is just beginning. What seems clear is that the boundary between environmental health and mental health is more permeable than traditional models have acknowledged. For providers committed to comprehensive patient care, the environment—not just the social environment, but the physical landscape itself—deserves a place in the clinical assessment.
References
- Galway, L. P., & Field, E. (2023). Solastalgia: An environmental influence on mental health. In International Encyclopedia of Public Health (Third Edition). Academic Press.
- Fischer, S., et al. (2024). Solastalgia and mental health: A scoping review. Environmental Research, 262, 119845.
- Cunsolo, A., & Ellis, N. R. (2018). Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss. Nature Climate Change, 8(4), 275-281.
- Hickman, C. (2020). We need to (find a way to) talk about … Eco-anxiety. Journal of Social Work Practice, 34(4), 411-424.
- Warsini, S., Mills, J., & Usher, K. (2014). Solastalgia: Living with the environmental damage caused by natural disasters. Prehospital and Disaster Medicine, 29(1), 87-90.
- Berry, H. L., Waite, T. D., Dear, K. B., Capon, A. G., & Murray, V. (2018). The case for systems thinking about climate change and mental health. Nature Climate Change, 8(4), 282-290.
- Tschakert, P., et al. (2019). One thousand ways to experience loss: A systematic analysis of climate-related intangible harm from around the world. Global Environmental Change, 55, 58-72.
- Palinkas, L. A., & Wong, M. (2020). Global climate change and mental health. Current Opinion in Psychology, 32, 12-16.
- Doherty, T. J., & Clayton, S. (2011). The psychological impacts of global climate change. American Psychologist, 66(4), 265-276.
- Climate Psychiatry Alliance. (2024). Clinical resources for climate-aware mental health care. Retrieved from climatepsychiatry.org
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