Climate Change on the Mind

In 1985, David Lee Roth began extracting himself from Van Halen’s shadow by releasing his EP Crazy from the Heat, with cover art of Roth waste deep in the waters off of the Seychelles Islands.

Twenty-seven years later, one has to wonder if Mr. Roth, even then, had climate change on the mind.

Seychelles, of course, is at significant risk to the impacts of a changing climate. Rising temperatures present a number of issues that must be adapted to, certainly from a public health perspective. Less obvious among them, though, is mental health.

The June 20 official start of summer arrived with furnace-like temperatures all along the east coast. This, after several weeks of awful wildfires in the western United States, which have forced evacuations from California to Colorado. And as firefighters valiantly work to stop thousands of acres of wildfires, and cities activate their health systems designed for severe heat events, there’s been no break from a stressful sequence of events—which certainly falls under the area of mental health—and the need to consider how public would deal with these events in extended and rapid succession.

The High Park fire west of Fort Collins, Colo. is being called one of the worst fires in Colorado history. Photo courtesy of PBS.org.

You can call it the mental aftermath.  A 2011 study by Australian researchers found that several years of continued catastrophic weather events on that continent have resulted in Cold War levels of anxiety and insecurity in children.

This extreme anxiety and stress are logical responses to extreme weather events—this on top of well-documented stressors like lack of access to food and water. A recent report by the National Wildlife Federation outlines how the uncertainty caused by unpredictable weather causes people to become depressed, even suicidal. The report, developed from conclusions of a high-level panel of psychiatrists, psychologists, and public-health and climate experts stated two hundred million Americans will be subject to stress because of climate change. 

Think about Hurricane Katrina and the doubling of mental health issues that occurred post-Hurricane Katrina.  A 2005 study of 283 children displaced by Hurricane Katrina revealed that they were nearly five times more likely than a pre-Katrina national comparison sample to have "serious emotional disturbance." This mental health category is similar to PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—and accounts for children's distress and social, behavioral and functional impairment.

Hurricane Katrina’s wake left four states with disaster areas, including all of Louisiana and Mississippi.

Public managers have an opportunity to view each of these events as case studies as they move forward in developing a response strategy. There is critical information to be gleaned with regards to how their communities respond to those problems unique to their area.

Stakeholders in the public and private sectors will need to ensure adequate community health services with enough capacity to handle a wide array of mental health challenges, including displacement, death, depression and anxiety.

One community’s heat wave is another community’s wildfire, but the common element is that people will be confronted with stressful situations—and that’s a pretty good baseline to start with.