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A new study badyzing half a billion tweets indicates that hot weather increases suicide rates and the use of depressive language on social media.
Research published in the journal Nature Climate change suggests that the effects of climate change could be as devastating as the influence of economic recessions with regard to increasing suicide rates.
The results show that the expected temperature rise up to 2050 could result in 21,000 additional suicides in the United States and Mexico.
"Surprisingly, these effects differ very little depending on the wealth of the population or its warm climate," said principal investigator Marshall Burke, an badistant professor at Stanford University.
Researchers have recognized for centuries that suicides tend to peak during the warmer months. However, many factors other than temperature also vary with the seasons – such as the unemployment rate or the amount of daylight – and until now, it was difficult to distinguish the role of temperature from other risk factors.
To dissociate the role of temperature from other factors, researchers compared historical data on temperature and suicides on thousands of US counties and Mexican municipalities over several decades.
The team also badyzed the language in more than half a billion updates or Twitter tweets to see if warmer temperatures are affecting mental well-being.
For example, they badyzed whether tweets more often contain terms such as "lonely", "trapped" or "suicidal" during warm periods.
The researchers found strong evidence linking warmer temperatures to higher suicide rates.
To understand how future climate change could affect suicide rates, the team used predictions of global climate models.
The rise in temperature by 2050 could increase suicide rates by 1.4% in the United States and 2.3% in Mexico.
"Warmer temperatures are clearly not the only risk factor for suicide, nor the most important," Burke said.
"But our findings suggest that warming can have a surprisingly large impact on suicide risk, which is important for our understanding of mental health as well as what we should expect when temperatures continue to warm up," Burke added.
Posted on: 28 July 2019 10:51
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