Epi in the News

Good point about the phrasing of the question Katherine, I had not considered that! I also agree that I think the findings of the survey (despite it's many limitations) are likely to be true. Many young people are far more engaged with the climate crisis than older generations.

I agree with you Katherine- I didn't think deeply about the way the question has been structured. That's a very interesting thought... 

But I think the idea of the survey was to look at how much of the psychiatrists are facing this problem rather than how much of a burden eco-anxiety is. They posed the same question to psychiatrists dealing with other age groups as well, and then compared the responses. All the more reason why one cannot comment on how much of a public health issue eco-anxiety actually is based on this article, as this was not the main aim of the survey. This sort of can be confusing to the members of the public reading this article.

Its mentioned in the article that the survey was conducted in early September- so I accessed the September survey results- which shows a response rate of only 5.3%.

Fathima

Hi all

I 'd like to pick up on the last point:

" There could be other reasons for the increased anxiety: Covid 19, more time at home and so more time on social media platforms, distress from parents losing their jobs, less family support groups, loss of loved ones etc. (not really sure whether these will be confounding variables because this is a cross-sectional study and we're not really measuring exposure/ outcome, are we?)"

My thoughts on this here below - what do you think?

- The study was actually analytical once they came to comparing proportions of child/adolescent psychologists reporting eco-anxiety in their patients to the proportion of general psychologists reporting it among patients in all age groups

- Exposure was young age, proxied by being a youth psychologist vs general/ all age group psychologist , and outcome was eco-anxiety, proxied by seeing eco-anxious patients in past year

- Covid could be a confounder if it was associated with exposure: age group seen by phycologist, and outcome: patients reporting eco-anxiety concerns in their practice, while not being on causal pathway. I guess Covid could have more effect on young people's awareness of environment issues through increased social media use during lock-down than the general population. but would Covid in this case be independently related to their propensity to report eco-anxiety? I am not sure it would be a real confounder . below an attempt at a DAG - I might be totally off track here and would be curious what others think.

Covid -> young people using internet more & gaining more awareness on ecological issues -> reporting these issues to health professionals..

- For the rest I agree with all that is said above:
-- we dont know how much selection bias there was making respondents systematically different from non respondents in each of the 2 comparison groups: child and adolescent vs general psychologists;
-- the outcome seems defined as proportion reporting seeing patients with eco-anxiety : this is not necessarily a useful measure of public health burden in light of non-response rate/potential selection bias and non-representativeness, the lack of information on proportion of patients affected, lack of uniform definition of what is understood by environmental and ecological issues, and whether these issues were the primary concern and reason for seeking treatment

would love to hear your thoughts on the above definitions of exposure & outcome and whether covid could be considered as confounder.

all the best

Olga