Ephrat Livni wrote an interesting article – published on 1 March 2019 on the website of the World Economic Forum – about how (the lack of) nature is affecting our health, including mental health.
She states: “You’ve got problems. Perhaps more than you know. Apart from all the usual woes—work, relationships, money, time—the civilized life may also be causing you psychological trauma. Disconnection from nature can be bad for our mental health. But there was no name for this particular malaise until 2000, when Australian sustainability professor Glenn Albrecht coined the term psychoterratica, creating the beginning of a vocabulary to discuss the relationship between mental health and environment.”
Livni concludes: “We have both a physical and psychological need to be in nature, as new research increasingly reveals, and we get sick when we’re disconnected from it. Luckily, the prescription for what ails us turns out to be a simple fix that is inexpensive and has no negative side effects”.
For the full article, please visit: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/03/psychoterratica-is-the-trauma-caused-by-distance-from-nature (This article is published in collaboration with Quartz)