The world has only a dozen years to act to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, and stave off the most catastrophic effects of climate change, according to the latest report from the United Nation's top climate science panel out Monday. Without rapid and drastic action, climate change will expose hundreds of millions more people to heat waves, sea-level rise, more extreme weather events—and, according to a new study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, worsened mental-health outcomes.
Previous studies have shown that rising temperatures can disrupt sleep patterns, worsen moods, and increase the risk of suicides, which led lead author Nick Obradovich and his colleagues to wonder if extreme temperatures might also lead to mental-health problems such as stress, depression, or anxiety. To find out, the researchers looked at self-reported mental-health data for some two million United States residents, collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System between 2002 and 2012. The team compared health data to meteorological records over the same period to find out how extreme temperatures, gradual warming, and extreme weather events tracked with residents' self-assessments of mental health.
"Generally what we found was that exposure to hotter temperatures and [more] precipitation increased the reporting of mental-health problems," says Obradovich, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab. Months with at least 25 days of precipitation increased the probability of mental-health problems by 2 percent, while an increase in average monthly temperatures to above 30 degrees Celsius (or 86 degrees Fahrenheit) led to a 0.5 percent increase in the probability of mental-health issues. While half a percent may sound insignificant, on a population scale, the shift would lead to some two million more people in the U.S. reporting mental-health issues, which are already widespread and costly for American society.
[For more on this story by KATE WHEELING, go to https://psmag.com/environment/...r-your-mental-health]
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