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The study highlights three distinct ways in which warmer, more extreme weather conditions undermine the mental well-being of those who are forced to do so. The results indicate that the effects will be most pronounced for women and low-income Americans.
"In the end, if the relationships observed in the recent past persist, the added climate change can magnify the burden of mental health throughout the society," wrote the study's authors on Monday. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The research team, led by Nick Obradovich, data specialist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, which examines climate change and human behavior, was guided by the experience of a diverse group of people from 263 cities from the country. All have participated in the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a health survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since 1984.
Between 2002 and 2012, nearly 2 million participants were asked about this question: "Now, think of your mental health, which includes stress, depression and emotional problems, for how many days in the last 30 days, your mental health has not been good?
Obradovich and his colleagues used the answers to classify people into two groups: those who reported mental health problems in the last days and those who did not.
The authors of the study acknowledged that it was far from assessing the true psychiatric state of an individual. But doing individual assessments of so many people just was not feasible. On the positive side, survey participants were chosen at random to be representative of the nation as a whole. In addition, the wording of the question allowed researchers to identify people in mental distress even if they had not looked for a state of occupational health, they wrote.
The CDC data included a location for each participant, and the researchers used it to map each person's mental health status to the time they lived. During the 10-year study period, they discovered three distinct ways of associating climate change with a degradation of mental health.
The first is what the authors called "exposure to short-term weather conditions", which they evaluated in two ways.
For starters, they recorded the highest temperature for each day in each city, then averaged these peaks in each month. When the maximum daily temperature reached an average of 86 degrees Fahrenheit or more, the odds of people having poor mental health were 1 percentage point higher than the months when the average maximum temperature was between 50 and 59 degrees and high temperature was higher. between 77 and 86 degrees.
Some people were more vulnerable than others, the researchers found. They classified participants into four groups based on their income and found that the effect of high temperatures on mental health was 60% higher for those at the bottom of the economic scale than for those who were at the top.
The researchers also found that being a woman instead of a man was associated with an effect of the same magnitude. When these factors were combined, they calculated that the negative effect of high temperatures on mental health was twice as high among low-income women as among high-income men.
The rainy days have also had adverse consequences. The probabilities of reporting mental health problems were 2 percentage points higher in the wettest months with more than 25 days of precipitation compared to months without precipitation.
Next, researchers examined the effect of warming over several years.
They divided their data into two periods: 2002 to 2006 and 2007 to 2011. Among the 156 cities for which data were available for both periods, they found that when the average maximum temperature increased by 1.8 degrees between years Previous and next, the prevalence of mental health problems increased by 2 percentage points.
Obradovich and his colleagues refined their analysis in several ways to ensure that this result was not a coincidence. For example, when they focused on the 78 cities for which data was available for every 10 years, they found that the effect was slightly larger.
The researchers noted that the effects of multi-year warming were most pronounced in the spring and summer.
Finally, the team examined the impact of hurricanes on mental health. They stated that they have distinguished this type of natural disaster, as climate change should make these storms more frequent and intense.
Data from the CDC showed that after the passage of Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast region in August 2005, the number of reported mental health problems increased in declared disaster areas . Meanwhile, in areas not affected by the hurricane, the mental health of the study participants improved after the storm.
By comparing hurricane victims to other Americans, the researchers were able to estimate how much exposure to Katrina was associated with changes in mental health. As a result, the occurrence of mental health problems was 4 points higher among those affected by the hurricane than among those who were not affected.
Although all three factors were significantly associated with a deterioration in mental health, there was a clear hierarchy between them – hurricanes were the worst, followed by long-term warming and short-term temperature changes.
The CDC surveys used in this study did not provide the kind of detail that researchers would need to explain exactly how climate change was leading to a decline in mental health. But there are many possibilities.
Researchers cited a few, including the fact that rising temperatures can force some people to move, uprooting their entire lives. Others can work in industries threatened by climate change and become unemployed. Hot weather discourages people from exercising and makes it harder to get a good night's sleep, and studies suggest that sleep deprivation increases the risk of depression.
"Given the vital role that good mental health plays in personal, social and economic well-being," concluded Obradovich and his co-authors, "our findings provide further evidence that climate change poses significant risks to people. human systems. "
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© 2018 Los Angeles Times
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