Vitamodo School · Bundle 6: Information Consumption · Brochure 2 of 10 · Version 1.0
Andris Saulitis, MD
For those who: have noticed substantial accumulated cost from chronic-alarm state about world events — sleep cost, mood deterioration, sense of futility, difficulty engaging with your own life.
Not for those who: want the brochure to either dismiss your concerns or validate the chronic alarm. The careful position is more substantive than either pole.
What this is — the clinical reality
There is a specific contemporary affective state that did not have a clinical name a generation ago and that now substantially organises the inner life of many patients. The state is characterised by persistent low-to-moderate anxiety about distant world events, by the sense that the world is in continuous catastrophic decline, by the experience that the news is always bad and getting always worse, by the cognitive content of climate collapse and political ruin and pandemic and economic instability and the threats yet to emerge. The state has been called news anxiety, climate anxiety, polycrisis anxiety, doomerism, and other related names; the popular vocabulary is unstable; the clinical reality is substantive. This brochure addresses the clinical reality, regardless of which popular name a particular reader has been using for their experience.
This brochure is for the reader who has noticed substantial accumulated cost from this state — sleep impairment, mood deterioration, sense of futility, difficulty engaging substantively with their own life — and who wants the careful framework rather than either the dismissive the world is fine, calm down response or the catastrophic you are right to be terrified, there is no point response. It builds on Brochure 1 of Bundle 6, which addressed the doomscrolling pattern that often accompanies this state; news anxiety can occur without substantial doomscrolling and doomscrolling can occur without substantial news anxiety, but in honest clinical assessment the two are substantially related, and the two brochures are best read together.
A note before we go further. Some of the contemporary anxieties about world events are, in honest assessment, warranted. The climate system is undergoing substantial change with substantial consequences; specific political situations have substantial implications; specific public-health threats are real and substantial. The careful framework does not dismiss the legitimate concerns. It distinguishes between honest concern that supports specific action and specific moral engagement and chronic-alarm state that has lost connection to specific action and that primarily produces accumulated cost without producing change. The distinction is substantive and consequential.
A second note. The chronic-alarm state is, in honest assessment, neither a moral achievement nor a moral failure. It is a substantive cognitive and affective state produced by the interaction of biological threat-detection systems, contemporary information environments, and meaning-making patterns that have substantially developed during periods of substantial historical change. The patient experiencing it is not weak; they are also not necessarily more morally engaged with the world than the patient who has substantively worked through the framework. The careful clinical position respects the patient's substantive engagement with reality while recognising that the chronic-alarm state is not the substantive engagement it sometimes feels like.