Precisely how he got there, and why, he does not remember, but Charlie Hertzog Young knows that in the autumn of 2019, aged 27 and at the height of his despair, he jumped from a high building in London. He landed on concrete, split open his pelvis like a book and demolished his legs. He was bleeding out – dying – and yet managed to have a pleasant conversation with a resident of the neighbouring building who thought he was a burglar. He survived, thanks to the speedy arrival of a paramedic with specialist trauma skills. Even so, he spent a month in a coma and six months in hospital. Eventually, he was discharged with legs so damaged that they both had to be amputated. He lost his job as a researcher and his rented flat.
The years leading to this moment are a searing story of personal and planetary pain. Aged 12, Hertzog Young worried about global heating and became a climate activist. He won a national award for founding a green council in his school. Gradually, he became a British Greta Thunberg, without the international fame or internet trolls. As the voice of youth, he was invited to global summits, including the 2009 World Economic Forum in Davos and, later that year, the UN climate summit in Copenhagen. “There are young people in communities all across the world who are trying to facilitate change,” he told the elders of Davos. “We’d like you to help us to help you.” Then, at just 17, he accosted the likes of Bill Gates and Barack Obama in corridors between events and harangued them about the urgency of taking action to stop global heating.
Billed as the last chance to save the world, the Copenhagen summit failed to produce a commitment to cut carbon emissions and restrict global heating to 2C. Furious environmental groups called the summit a “crime scene”; even Obama admitted the limited agreement was “not enough”. Hertzog Young was distraught. He slipped into a deep depression. Around the same time, he began hallucinating that he was being stalked by a chimerical, constantly changing wolf. Eventually, aged 20, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and sent to a psychiatric unit. A cycle of breakdowns and treatment intensified. His family were in agony; he was given every treatment from psychoanalysis to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). And then he jumped.
It is such a devastating life story that it is bewildering to meet Hertzog Young, now 31, and find him smiling broadly and looking the picture of health in his small flat beside a busy road in north London. He radiates calm and good vibes. Softly spoken and extremely eloquent, he remains a climate campaigner and has written his first book. Spinning Out is a powerful elucidation of the links between the climate crisis, mental health and social change. Like encountering its author, it is an unexpectedly uplifting experience.
“When you’ve lost your legs, you walk from your core,” he says, standing tall on his newly fitted prosthetics to show me. “I’ve got a really strong core because I have to be fit to survive, if I want to go and do things.” He is in constant physical pain, faces unceasing rehabilitation and yet has risen to the challenge of rebuilding his world. “I’m physically and psychologically stronger than I’ve ever been as a result of what happened to me. I feel freer and more alive than I have done since I was a teenager. I’m really not saying, ‘Go jump off a building,’ but it’s been great for me.” He laughs at himself.
***
One of four brothers, Hertzog Young grew up in a loving family in north-west London with a scriptwriter dad and art director mum. He comes from a long line of agitators: from his maternal great-great-grandfather, Marcel Cachin, who co-founded the French Communist party, to his paternal grandfather, Bob Young, a brilliant and difficult revolutionary philosopher of science who argued that science, technology and medicine were not founded on neutral facts but rooted in the prevailing ideologies of the day. Since Hertzog Young was small, he too has challenged the ideological structures around him. He was “quite badly bullied” at his London comprehensive and, shortly before he became a climate activist, remembers lying in his garden in his school uniform, in the rain, refusing to get up because of the “pointlessness” of civilisation. There was other trauma too: when he was 12, his grandmother, who had depression, went missing; her body was found six months later at the bottom of a cliff she had jumped from on the Isle of Wight.
Around this time, Hertzog Young was sent to a psychoanalyst. “Social obligation has always been a really strong presence in our family. The other thing is that when dealing with issues, usually the answer was psychoanalysis,” he smiles. Psychoanalysis gave him the ability to tell “true but storied narrative versions of why I feel a certain way, and explain it very rationally and cerebrally”, but today he has a critical view of it: after sessions he would “walk out of the door and feel as if I just opened myself up and had nothing back. It made it so much worse.”
He found a greater sanctuary in nature, attending summer camps in the countryside. “It was a pared-back, communal way of living: waking each morning, sitting in a circle on some logs and deciding together what we wanted to do that day.” Through these “chaotic and beautiful” camps, he acquired older teen mentors, who told him about global heating and took him to talks by climate scientists. At the camps, Hertzog Young was also initiated into more radical activism, learning to be “a shadow scout” – moving unseen through the woods. It gave him the skills to help the direct action group Plane Stupid: he slipped his way past security patrols undetected to the perimeter fence at Stansted airport for one protest in 2008. He could move “like smoke”, he laughs. “It’s fucking hard now without feet.”
That year, when he was 16, he was invited to Downing Street to receive an award from then PM Gordon Brown for his climate activism and smuggled a cameraphone in his sock. When another Plane Stupid activist, Dan Glass, superglued himself to Brown’s arm, the picture that went round the world was taken by Hertzog Young. The PM can be seen smiling unwittingly while Glass places his gluey left hand authoritatively on his arm.
Climate summitry followed. Davos “was wild”, he says. “As a very energetic and pushy young man, I had a go at Bill Clinton and I had a much longer chat with Kofi Annan than he would’ve wanted. My mum used to call me ‘Just one more thing Charlie’. She was worried about what the exposure would do to me, but my parents had similar politics and were very supportive of what I was doing.” When he attended the Copenhagen summit, he idealistically believed that the lack of action on climate change was because of shortcomings in communication: if he told leaders how to cut carbon emissions, they would do it. They didn’t: there was no agreement at Copenhagen, and he sank into a deep depression.
The wolf hallucinations had already begun and, after the summit, he hid himself away in his friend’s room for a week. “I just stayed in the room and the wolf was there the whole time,” he says. “When I started hallucinating, I kept it to myself because I thought it would not be understood, and also I had this exhilarating and confusing private realm that I could toy with, and which toyed with me.”
He soldiered on, attending the 2010 UN climate summit in Cancún, and beginning an undergraduate degree in economics at Harvard. Here, he helped stage a much-publicised walkout of lectures given by Gregory Mankiw, the professor who had been George W Bush’s chief economic adviser in the White House. Hyper-busy with activism in the US, Hertzog Young became convinced there was something in his blood making him usefully productive, and that the authorities needed to distil it and give it to UN negotiators. He phoned a hospital, was invited in and “forcibly medicated and sectioned”, he says.
He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and returned to the UK, where he was sectioned again. Supported by his family, he recovered sufficiently to enrol at Soas University of London, where he flitted between survivor and “saviour mode”, looking after a friend who tried to kill themselves. Despite treatment, including from an extremely dedicated psychiatrist, he had another “major breakdown” and spent two years in one room at his mum’s flat (his parents were now separated). “I was more physically immobilised by depression than I have been by not having legs,” he says now.
He recovered enough to finish a masters in his mid-20s and find work as a researcher for George Monbiot and for the Royal Society of Arts. But the cycle of manic work and debilitating depression continued. In 2019, he was about to move into a flat with friends and start a new research job when he experienced “a four-day black hole”, he says. “The last thing I remember is lying on the floor saying I want to die.” He starts laughing. “This makes me look like such a prick, but I’d just got back from a holiday in Italy and a bottle of grappa had smashed in my bag and fucked my MacBook. It’s the most middle-class reason to have an emotional breakdown. I was on the floor with this sticky liquid and my broken laptop, genuinely properly suicidal. Actually, it was deep existential dread and doom – humans were a mistake, an evolutionary error, and I was seeing cruelty and darkness in everything.” Two days later, Hertzog Young went to see his therapist. He has no memory of what happened next but, ultimately, he jumped.
***
When Hertzog Young was in a coma, his family expected him to die. Today he is acutely aware of the suffering he caused them, and one of his life goals is to make reparations. But he’s also devoting his days to a new kind of climate activism that also pays attention to the mental health crisis. He’s working with Fahad Rizwan, a Pakistani engineer and environmental activist whose Green Squad is planting trees in Pakistan, and with Connecting Climate Minds, a global project addressing the mental health challenges created by the climate crisis.
“I don’t blame myself for jumping,” he says. “I blame the Conservative government, climate change, neoliberal capitalism and extractivism [the mass export of resources from the global south associated with colonialism and post-colonial capitalism] but they are very hard targets.”
Some might blame the climate movement for his distress. Does he feel angry at the way he was deployed as a teenage activist? “No. Not at all,” he says. “I’m angry at how it played out, but I think a great deal of my trauma from being in the movement came from being thrust into spaces and throwing myself into spaces like the UN climate talks when I was a teenager. I wish I’d known better how to listen to my body and listen to other activists who were telling me to slow down and look after myself. I’m angry at the way these high-powered decision spaces operate. That’s what I’m angry at.”
Hertzog Young says that his young self wasn’t “completely held” by the big global summits he attended in the past. “Living in a culture that doesn’t recognise the enormity of what’s happening and actually shuts down people who are trying to build better things is a really isolating and destructive experience,” he says. Today, he believes that “quieter” parts of the climate movement better support young campaigners, including Jennifer Uchendu’s Eco Anxiety in Africa project; Civic Square, a hub for creating just and climate-friendly local neighbourhoods; the Good Grief Network, which has just published a book on how to live in the climate crisis; and the Climate Psychology Alliance, which hosts climate cafes and links young activists with climate-aware psychologists.
Young climate activists seem to have each other’s backs – Greta Thunberg spoke to 2,700 people at the Southbank Centre in London in July alongside five other young female activists who were full of support for each other – but Hertzog Young worries about the pressure of global exposure on today’s climate celebrities. “The weight of responsibility currently forced on the shoulders of Greta makes me incredibly angry and upset,” he says. “I know a lot of people of Greta’s age who have had major breakdowns without any of the hatred, pressure, responsibility or burden. People who are in that position and remain there are doing it through immense inner strength, pain and mutual support.”
We may be getting better at talking about the mental health crisis, but few connect it to climate breakdown. Scientific studies show that young people are more likely to suffer from climate anxiety and a Lancet study of 10,000 young people living in 10 countries found that 56% believe humanity is doomed. “Most people who are polled think that mental health issues are something to do with either a chemical imbalance in the brain, some sort of neurological glitch, or genetic. That model is completely outdated,” says Hertzog Young. “There are so many demonstrable links between social, ideological, ecological and material realities outside the brain that have a far greater impact on mental health. Climate change is throwing so much pain, trauma, stress, angst and cultural toxicity at us. It can breed distrust, apathy and nihilism and it can also breed deep fear. Even for people who are experiencing the climate crisis at a distance, through the lens of the media, there’s a medically recognised causal pathway to depression, anxiety and PTSD.”
People living in places “taking the direct hits of climate change” face even bigger mental health impacts, Hertzog Young argues. Global heating could lead to up to 40,000 additional deaths from suicide in the US and Mexico by 2050, according to one study. Another found that direct exposure to wildfires significantly increases the risk of “severe” mental illness including PTSD and depression. The World Health Organization found that 24% of people affected by disasters will develop clinically significant post-traumatic stress syndrome in the first six months afterwards. “The climate system is unravelling and it’s visiting a mental unravelling on all of us,” says Herzog Young.
That’s a grim diagnosis, but two-thirds of Spinning Out focuses on the cure. Put simply, Hertzog Young has found the best balm for eco-anxiety is not to “rush at problems” as his younger self did, but to take action alongside others in more careful, mutually supportive ways. “Connecting meaningfully with other people is liberatory,” he says. “I find most comfort and joy and belonging in action and healing and recovery, with people who feel similarly dislocated from the dominant culture. That’s the only way to build real utopias.”
Campaigning should be fun too, and Hertzog Young quotes 20th-century activist Saul Alinsky: a good tactic is one your people enjoy. Hertzog Young offers ideas for action that would suit different personality types, so if the tyre extinguishers movement (letting down tyres of SUVs) sounds too confrontational, there’s more friendly sounding activism from urban guerrilla gardening (such as unauthorised tree-planting) to “art‑ivism”. Climate action can be indirect, too: offering local food during the cost of living crisis, doing DIY home insulation for neighbours, even campaigning for a four-day week because extra time off work creates more opportunities for the “mutual aid” that he believes is key to creating a healthier society.
“Nobody has the blueprint for how to do activism or for what society should look like,” he says. “What seems to be happening today is lots of different groups are experimenting with different ways of looking after each other and thriving together within a climate crisis that’s fundamentally changing civilisation. It sounds ridiculous, but we have to be playful and creative, in the same way that kids play with random bricks to learn how to use their hands. We don’t have the answers because we’ve been stuck in a system that has held us back from imagining alternatives, let alone playing them out.”
We may seem to be stuck with western capitalism, which is bringing sickness to our planet and ourselves, but one group who might imagine new ways of living, Hertzog Young argues, are people like himself – with serious mental health issues. Both climate breakdown and mental breakdown are vital warnings, he explains, and through them we may yet discover how to transform ourselves and society. As he writes in Spinning Out: “The psychotic mind can, uncannily, scout ahead for meaning in uncertainty, an act of exploration that has immense utility. The depressive mind can strip reality back to a bleak but pragmatic objectivity. The anxious mind can protect us from real dangers that others cannot see.”
Madness, he says, may give him and others glimpses of drastically different forms of reality. On his kitchen wall he has hung a painting he made of an alternative society he visualised in several lucid “dreams” while in a coma. “I’m deeply invested in building a different world with people because I’ve seen some alternatives,” he says. “I’ve not seen the blueprint, but I’ve seen what lives outside our cultural, economic and political prison.”
I don’t think Hertzog Young would thank me if I smoothed his remarkable recovery into a happy ending. He endures constant pain in the nerve endings above his amputated shins, he rarely sleeps more than five hours a night, and battles with medical professionals who can’t look holistically at his requirements. When we speak again six weeks after our first interview, he is back in “survival mode”, flat-bound and unable to use his prosthetics while awaiting urgent surgery because his amputated bones are growing through his nerves.
How does he stay well? He attributes his recovery to the support of his family, conventional medication prescribed for his bipolar disorder (such as lithium), a recovery coach (a type of specialist peer support for people who have undergone trauma) and his own climate activism. “Plus,” he says, “I’m experiencing the immense benefits of deepening my relationships with people who have supported me and I’m learning to support” – his own personal version of mutual aid through attentive, reciprocal friendships. Sometimes, he says, he sees his life as being in a leaky boat in a storm: he’s spent too long trying to patch holes, but is now making structural changes – following “healthy patterns of life” to stay afloat. “That’s not, ‘I’m cured.’ I don’t believe in that. But I’ve got enough of the basics down that I can now look at the horizon without sinking.”
How does he feel about the climate crisis now? “I think we’re fine actually,” he jokes, deadpan. He apologises for struggling to provide his characteristically eloquent “pontification” on the subject because he is in such physical pain, but still conjures up a compelling answer. “I’m terrified,” he says, “but I’m also palpably aware of how it could give us the opportunity to fundamentally change civilisation in wonderful ways.”
• Spinning Out by Charlie Hertzog Young is published by Footnote Pressat £12.99. To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
