Support networks aim to help kids through the polycrisis
Support networks aim to help kids through the polycrisis
支持网络旨在帮助青少年应对“多重危机”
Sometime in the late 2000s, Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car, headed toward her great-grandmother’s tiny town in the south of Thailand. She watched big mountains pass by out the window. She was just six years old but was about to be hit by an adult-size realization. “They were just quarried out,” she says. “Like half the mountain just dug out and disappeared, and so there was just this huge orange face.” 21世纪初的某个时候，皮姆·沙利文-泰勒（Pim Sullivan-Tailyour）坐在车后座，前往她曾祖母在泰国南部的一个小镇。她看着窗外掠过的大山。当时她才六岁，却即将迎来一种成年人般的认知。“它们被开采得面目全非，”她说，“就像半座山被挖走消失了，只剩下一面巨大的橙色断层。”
Although she probably didn’t know the word “quarry” back then, she sensed that what she was seeing was unnatural. She also knew, from family stories, that her mother had bathed in a nearby river when she was young, its water so glass-clear she could see fish swimming by. But the extraction had muddied the water. “We’re changing things,” Sullivan-Tailyour thought. “And it doesn’t seem right.” 虽然她当时可能还不知道“采石场”（quarry）这个词，但她感觉到眼前所见是不自然的。她还从家人的讲述中得知，她母亲年轻时曾在附近的一条河里洗澡，河水清澈见底，能看到鱼儿游过。但开采活动让河水变得浑浊。“我们正在改变这一切，”沙利文-泰勒心想，“而且这似乎是不对的。”
It was the first time it occurred to her that humans could alter the world—and that they were. For the worse. She carried that knowledge with her as she got older and her family moved to the UK. There, she joined teenagers from other schools in the Schools Sustainability Network, an umbrella organization for groups that work on environmental initiatives. But even with those connections, Sullivan-Tailyour didn’t encounter anyone at her own school who was interested in environmental activism. She felt lonely in her desire to push for change—and burnt out on working solo. “I was pretty much the only person who wanted to do these things,” she says. 这是她第一次意识到人类可以改变世界——而且他们确实在改变，还是向着更坏的方向。随着年龄增长和家庭搬迁到英国，她一直带着这种认知。在那里，她加入了“学校可持续发展网络”（Schools Sustainability Network），这是一个涵盖多个环保倡议组织的伞形机构。但即便有了这些联系，沙利文-泰勒在自己的学校里依然没遇到对环保行动感兴趣的人。她渴望推动变革却感到孤独，独自奋斗也让她精疲力竭。“我几乎是唯一一个想做这些事的人，”她说。
That was when she heard about another initiative, called Force of Nature. A UK-based organization, in 2021 it had spun up Becoming a Force of Nature, a kind of informal online group therapy program, for kids and young adults worried about climate. The sessions aimed to help young people like Sullivan-Tailyour take their worries and turn them into action, stemming the exact kind of anxiety and burnout she was feeling. She signed up and soon logged into Zoom for her first session. Dozens of faces from dozens of countries looked back at her. “I realized that I wasn’t alone,” she says. 就在那时，她听说了另一个名为“自然之力”（Force of Nature）的倡议。这是一个总部位于英国的组织，2021年推出了“成为自然之力”（Becoming a Force of Nature）项目，这是一种针对担忧气候问题的青少年和年轻人的非正式在线团体治疗计划。这些课程旨在帮助像沙利文-泰勒这样的年轻人将忧虑转化为行动，从而缓解她所感受到的那种焦虑和倦怠。她报了名，很快登录Zoom参加了第一次会议。来自几十个国家的几十张面孔出现在屏幕上。“我意识到我并不孤单，”她说。
She began to suspect that kids at her school actually did feel the way she did, even if they weren’t doing anything about it. Sullivan-Tailyour was right, it turns out: Global surveys have found that most kids are anxious about the state of the world—and not just about whether sea levels and carbon counts will continue to rise. They are growing up in a time of what some historians, policymakers, and economists are calling a “polycrisis”: The planet is warming, yes, but also a pandemic happened and could happen again, conflicts keep erupting, nuclear weapons lurk menacingly in silos, housing is growing impossibly expensive, groceries and gas can feel like luxury purchases, health-care costs are skyrocketing, authoritarianism is on the rise, partisanship splits populations, jobs are hard to get and there’s rampant worry AI will take more and more of them, and pings about all those things (and more!) arrive 24-7 in polarizing digital echo chambers. 她开始怀疑，其实她学校里的孩子们也有同样的感受，只是没有付诸行动。事实证明，沙利文-泰勒是对的：全球调查显示，大多数孩子对世界现状感到焦虑——不仅仅是担心海平面和碳排放量是否会持续上升。他们成长在一个被历史学家、政策制定者和经济学家称为“多重危机”（polycrisis）的时代：地球正在变暖，没错，但除此之外，疫情发生过且可能再次发生，冲突不断爆发，核武器在发射井中虎视眈眈，住房变得贵得离谱，食品和汽油有时感觉像是奢侈品，医疗成本飞涨，威权主义抬头，党派之争撕裂了民众，工作难找，而且人们普遍担心人工智能会夺走越来越多的岗位，关于所有这些（以及更多！）事情的推送，在极化的数字回声室里24小时不间断地轰炸着他们。
That’s a lot. And it’s why online networks like Force of Nature have popped up. Although they’re not taking over the planet, they have gained thousands of participants. And they’re now dealing with climate not as an isolated issue but as one facet of a generally troubled world. The goal is to help young people, who are experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety at higher rates than earlier generations, deal with their feelings about the multivariately changing future they are maturing into. But the science on the effectiveness of these sorts of networks is still nascent, and psychological scholars—and some practitioners—say it’s time for the field to measure itself. That way, schools, parents, and kids themselves can know which programs to invest their time and resources in to actually help young people feel better. 这确实太多了。这就是为什么像“自然之力”这样的在线网络会涌现出来。虽然它们并没有接管地球，但已经吸引了数千名参与者。它们现在处理气候问题时，不再将其视为孤立的问题，而是将其视为一个普遍动荡世界的一个侧面。其目标是帮助那些抑郁和焦虑症状发生率高于前几代人的年轻人，处理他们对正在成熟并面临多重变化的未来的感受。但关于这类网络有效性的科学研究尚处于起步阶段，心理学学者——以及一些从业者——表示，该领域是时候进行自我评估了。这样，学校、家长和孩子们自己才能知道应该将时间和资源投入到哪些项目中，从而真正帮助年轻人改善心理状态。
Tough times
艰难时刻
The existential dread that comes with the climate crisis is so pervasive that it’s had an official name for many years: eco-anxiety. “The American Psychological Association calls it a ‘chronic fear of environmental doom,’” says Liza Jachens, a psychologist and assistant professor at the University of Nottingham’s school of medicine. “What people describe is closer to grief. A real sense of loss—not just fear of what is coming but mourning for what has already gone.” 气候危机带来的生存恐惧是如此普遍，以至于它多年来一直有一个正式名称：生态焦虑（eco-anxiety）。“美国心理学会将其称为‘对环境灾难的长期恐惧’，”诺丁汉大学医学院心理学家兼助理教授丽莎·雅琴斯（Liza Jachens）说，“人们所描述的更接近于悲伤。一种真实的失落感——不仅仅是对未来的恐惧，更是对已经逝去之物的哀悼。”
Lise Van Susteren, a psychiatrist and coauthor of “The Psychological Effects of Global Warming on the United States,” a 2012 report for the National Wildlife Federation, has called it “pre-traumatic” stress; she sees it as a kind of anticipatory trauma. In a 2021 study measuring climate anxiety, 56% of 10,000 children and young people in 10 countries agreed with the statement “Humanity is doomed.” But there isn’t really a word to describe feelings people have about
A 2025 study from Polish researchers attempted to define “polycrisis syndrome” in the young people bubbling into adulthood in this hot soup of ingredients. The researchers assessed their reactions to the many crises using established scales of emotional and mental symptoms—things like the “Flourishing Index” and the “Difficulties in Emotional Regulation Scale.” “Most young individuals in our study face psychological challenges,” the authors write. In fact, more than 60% reported problems —difficulty regulating emotion, symptoms of depression, and lower overall mental and physical well-being—that they attributed to the cumulative stress of world affairs. 波兰研究人员在2025年进行的一项研究试图定义那些在这一团乱麻中步入成年的年轻人的“多重危机综合征”。研究人员使用既定的情绪和心理症状量表——如“繁荣指数”（Flourishing Index）和“情绪调节困难量表”（Difficulties in Emotional Regulation Scale）——评估了他们对多种危机的反应。“我们研究中的大多数年轻人都在面临心理挑战，”作者写道。事实上，超过60%的人报告了问题——包括情绪调节困难、抑郁症状以及整体身心健康水平下降——他们将这些问题归因于世界局势带来的累积压力。
That finding meshes with earlier, more climate-specific research suggesting that the kids are (sorry) not all right. In 2021, researchers published a landmark study in The Lancet Planetary Health measuring climate anxiety in 10,000 children and young people in 10 countries. Around 60% reported being very or extremely worried about climate change, with more than 45% saying that eco-anxiety affected their daily ability to function. 这一发现与早期更侧重于气候的研究相吻合，这些研究表明孩子们（抱歉）确实不太好。2021年，研究人员在《柳叶刀-星球健康》（The Lancet Planetary Health）上发表了一项具有里程碑意义的研究，测量了10个国家1万名儿童和青少年的气候焦虑情况。约60%的人表示对气候变化感到非常或极其担忧，超过45%的人表示生态焦虑影响了他们的日常功能。