Dépaysement refers to changes to, disorientation in, and alienation from the familiar at home.

Dépaysement can emerge from unwanted environmental change, adversely affecting mental health.

Dealing with dépaysement requires contextual approaches, but some people may struggle to overcome it.

Environmental change is inevitable. Still, when it affects the landscapes around us, it can be disconcerting, leading to negative mental health impacts. A word with multiple meanings, connotations, interpretations, and applications characterizes the complex emotions of experiencing change to, disorientation in, and alienation from the familiar at home: dépaysement.

Homesickness does not capture the full depth of dépaysement, because homesickness presumes a cure by returning home. Dépaysement might not be curable, particularly in the sense of experiencing a change of scene or a feeling of displacement from home—all without having moved. Mental health impacts can be melancholy, anxiety, worry, or being unsettled, confused, or depressed.

A storm pounds a cliff, pushing the coastline back several metres overnight. A beetle invasion kills a centuries-old forest. Human-caused climate change produces winters with almost no snow.

These experiences can be disconcerting for people who have lived in a place for decades, or for communities which have been there for centuries, and never seen changes of such scale. Those attuned to their environment are used to the peace of the cliffside view or forest stroll, learning from nature, or they rely on signs in the snow for hunting and traveling. When one’s home is suddenly unrecognizable, disrupting routines and mindsets, and so producing mental disequilibrium, it can be described as dépaysement.

Some struggle to accept that these changes are inevitable or typical. Others embrace the situation, enjoying exploring anew, documenting the shifts, and enthusiastically learning about the similarities to and differences from yesterday and yesteryear.

Part of the challenge is separating natural, expected environmental change from human activity. The climate displays numerous variations across decades, with the names explaining the location and alteration, such as the North Atlantic Oscillation and the Indian Ocean Dipole. More locally, rivers erode their banks to snake along different channels while landslides and rockfalls erode some hillsides and build up land below.

Layered on these changes are slopes cut for roads and railways, meadows dug for open-pit mines, woodlands felled for timber, and human-caused climate change affecting weather and ocean globally.

Farmers can be frustrated that their seasons are no longer the same as when they grew up, so their food and income drop as their crops and livestock suffer. Fishers might die from misreading the clouds and the waves. Communities have been forced from their forests and land, unwillingly resettling in unfamiliar territory.

It is unsurprising that people lose connection with their environment—and with each other and their community.

Dealing with dépaysement

Redressing this alienation and disorientation is not straightforward, notably when everyone expresses it. Perhaps little can re-create what home is. Much will be contextual, trying to understand what suits an individual, a family, a household, and a community.

Eco-inspiration will work for those who are adaptable mentally and who have options and resources to change their lifestyles and livelihoods to make use of their new and ever-changing environment. Others will choose to move, managing to resettle successfully while lamenting what they left behind. Music or magic motivates others through messages and actions.

Some people and communities, understandably, cannot respond positively to any “solution.” Their worldview is structured on the environment and home they know, gaining their wisdom from their ancestors, elders, lands, and waters, yet now being unable to pass it to the next generations.

For them, dépaysement is more than “solastalgia,” meaning psychological distress from nature changing. It is not just nature, but also home, comfort, and security, alongside health and well-being, with the latter manifesting as interconnected mental and physical health impacts. Since the environment will not stop changing, naturally and from human activity, the best option is to support the people and communities as much as possible, offering them as much as possible, while accepting that dépaysement may, in the end, define their life. And its end.

Albrecht, G.A. 2005. ‘Solastalgia’. A New Concept in Health and Identity. PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, no. 3, pp. 41-55.

Albrecht, G.A. 2019. Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York.

Land Body Ecologies. 2024. Stories of Solastalgia. Lawrence & Wishart Ltd, London, UK.

Lévi-Strauss, C. 1952. La Notion d'Archaïsme en Ethnologie. Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, vol. 12, pp. 3-25.

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