Editor’s Note: As the world experiences record-breaking temperatures and worsening climate challenges, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Discover how to align your personal interests with effective steps and learn how to get involved at Climate Week NYC September 22-29.
Aug. 21, 2024 – Maui seemed like the perfect vacation spot for Jennifer Chan Heth, her husband, Josh, and their two beach-loving children. Soon after arriving from Alameda, CA, in early August last year, they settled into their rented condo in Ka’anapali, looking forward to days of fun and sunshine.
Climate events would dash those plans.
Hurricane Dora was passing through, but no one seemed to think it was a big deal, Jennifer said. Then the winds kicked up even more, the electricity went out, and cell service went down. At the condo, people were lining up to get glow sticks. They heard there was a fire in Lahaina, about 5 miles south, but that officials were keeping an eye on it.
The Heths tried to cook the food they’d picked up at a nearby store, but the lines for the outdoor grills were unbearably long. Yet they weren’t in panic mode. “We couldn’t smell anything, and there was no ash falling down,” Jennifer said.
They went to bed in the dark, then at 3:30 a.m. were jolted awake when the condo's emergency alarm went off and an announcement came, repeated over and over, to evacuate right away. The fire – which ultimately killed 101 people and destroyed more than 2,200 structures – was raging. The Heths had already packed up their car, so they started driving. It was pitch black, with no cell service and no details about what was going on, Heth recalled. Olivia, then 6, and Jack, then 4, “were freaking out,” she said.“Not having any information was the craziest part.” They just kept driving, finally finding a place to stay in Wailea by 6 a.m. It’s only about an hour’s drive south of Lahaina but wasn’t impacted by the fires.
Once safe, they tried to recoup the remaining time to relax. Yet the scary memories linger. Before this year’s vacation to the Caribbean, the kids said they didn’t want to go to Hawaii and didn’t want to be around another fire.
“Just telling you the story right now makes me tear up,” Jennifer said.
Climate Change Drives Climate Events
The Heths’ saga reflects a grim truth: Climate change is directly adding to emergencies caused by extreme heat, wildfires, floods, tropical storms, and hurricanes, as the World Health Organization warns.
The events are taking a toll not only on our physical health, but our mental health – and that’s a growing focus of research and concern.
The sobering truth is, researchers have a wealth of events to study. According to the National Centers for Environmental Information, there have been 19 confirmed weather or climate disaster events in the U.S. this year with losses surpassing $1 billion each.
What’s “normal” after experiencing something as scary as the Heths did? The range of mental health reactions during and after a climate event varies, but in general, people may experience distress, anxiety, depression, low mood, and a feeling of being hyper-aware of real or perceived threats said Alison R. Hwong, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, CA. Her long-standing interest in the topic increased after she moved to California in 2016 and had to wear an N95 mask while riding her bike to work at the University of California-San Francisco during the 2017 Santa Rosa wildfires, which killed 24 people and displaced about 100,000.
Researchers have found that women and older adults are more vulnerable to mental health problems after at least some climate events. Those with existing mental health issues may be another vulnerable group. But no one is immune.
Research: Mental Health Effects
Here’s what some of the research about climate events and mental health has found so far:
- Mental health effects after climate events are widespread. In a recent study, Hwongpolled 24,000 people in the California Health Interview Survey, which added questions in 2021about exposure to extreme weather events and mental health responses. More than half, 53%, said their mental health was affected by climate events. Those affected were more likely to be younger, White, women, college-educated, or live in a rural area. She can’t explain the findings entirely but said she thought those who are younger and college-educated may be more aware of climate change and also more fluent in talking about their mental health.
- The need for mental health help is real. Exposure to wildfires, for instance, leads to an increase in anxiety-related emergency room visits, according to Yang Liu, PhD, chair and professor of environmental health at the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta. His team analyzed data from nearly 1.9 million emergency room visits across five states (California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, and Utah) from 2007 through 2018 and found wildfire smoke events, when wildfires contribute to pollution, were linked with a 6.3% increase in mental health-related ER visits. He found women, girls, and older adults most vulnerable. One surprise: Seeing smoke triggered more anxiety than seeing fire. “An actively burning fire in your ZIP code won’t necessarily increase your anxiety level,” Liu said. “But a smoke plume in your ZIP code will increase your anxiety.”
- Extreme heat waves affect mental health. That’s the topic of Liu’s next study. As other experts have found, the number of hot nights has exceeded the number of hot days over the past few years, perhaps affecting sleep quality, which is an important driver of mental health.
- Exposure to events, such as hurricanes, can lead to mental health issues even among people previously mentally healthy. It can also worsen the mental health of people with preexisting mental illness, two other studies have found. Experiencing a hurricane can trigger major depression, anxiety disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), researchers found.
- It’s not just a single climate event that can affect our mental health. When it comes to the effect of heat on mental health issues, “it’s not just at the extremes we should be worried about,” said Nick Obradovich, PhD, chief science officer at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, OK, but the ongoing patterns over time. In his research, he looked at weather data and reported mental health difficulties drawn from nearly 2 million U.S. residents between 2002 and 2012. He found as monthly temperatures increase over time, so does the chance of mental health issues. A Stanford study linked increases in monthly average temperatures with a rise in suicide rates, predicting continued climate change could result in a 1.4% increase in suicides in the U.S. and a 2.3% increase in Mexico by 2050.
Climate Events Over Time Can Trigger ‘Solastalgia’
Jeffrey Katzman, MD, director of education at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, CT, lectures on the topic of climate events and mental health at medical meetings.
While there are mental health effects from individual events, he said, there are also impacts from chronic and ongoing events, such as the drying up of rivers. This can all lead to what he and other experts call solastalgia – distress caused by environmental change.
“It describes the way we are connected to and moved by the Earth, and a yearning for those experiences,” Katzman said. Imagine, he said, living by a river with a beautiful view, and losing it when that river dries up.
“We know going to nature is one of the most important things we can do for mental well-being,” he said. And climate change events are making that harder to do.
More Views From the Trenches
Sue Hecht, a social worker in New York and Florida, lived in Island Park, NY, when Hurricane Sandy wreaked its destruction in October 2012. The water rose quickly, resulting in 7 feet of water in the basement of her rental home. She sheltered in place, concerned that her car wouldn’t make it out.
Help was scarce; she went 28 days without heat, hot water, or electricity. “It was hell, the whole thing was hell,” she said recently. Depression and anxiety set in. “Honestly, I cried every single day.”
Being around it all the time and trying to go through her things was tough, she said, “a mixture of grief, depression and anxiety.”
Tim Conrad works as an information officer for local governments in British Columbia, Canada, getting information out to the public when disasters such as wildfires and floods occur. “In the response work, I’ve noticed a notable negative shift in the well-being of residents and responders in recent years,” said Conrad, who has responded to ice jams, hurricanes, floods, landslides, and many wildfires.
During a wildfire in the Shuswap area last year, he said, “A fellow walked up to me and said, ‘I want to kill you.’ He had been evacuated and was just let back in.” The man apologized a few days later, but that experience is becoming more common, he said. Conrad remembers a woman he was trying to help got really angry and told him she hated him. She had just lost her home.
Social Cohesion to the Rescue
In her study, Hwong, the Stanford researcher, also looked into the healing effects of what she calls social cohesion. They asked questions such as, “Do you trust your neighbors?” “Do people in the neighborhood help out each other?” and “Do you feel safe in the neighborhood?”
“People who did feel safer, more connected, more neighborly reported fewer negative health effects of climate change,” she said. “Community support may buffer some of these negative mental health effects.”
Hecht suggests something that helped her: Connecting right away to a community page so you can get information about services, support groups, and other sources of help.
Calling in the Pros
“Just because you’ve been through an event doesn’t mean you have a psychiatric diagnosis,” Hwong said. “Many of us have anxiety about climate change and the warming planet,” but it doesn’t mean seeing a psychiatrist is necessary.
But if mental health issues persist after an event, professional help might be wise, Hwong said. “If it affects your daily life for 2 weeks or more, I would seek help,” such as seeing a counselor or asking about medications.
