The unseen effects of climate change on mental health Premium

The study indicated that people with mental health conditions seem to be at a greater risk of succumbing to heat-related deaths. The stakes are even higher for people diagnosed with schizophrenia, anxiety or bipolar disorder as periods of intense heatwave proved to be fatal for them. 

The mercury is soaring across India, with many places reporting unusually high temperature readings. It may not be possible to link each heat event to climate change, but we know climate change is bringing such anomalies to more areas, and with greater intensity.

We also know climate change is disproportionately affecting society’s most vulnerable members, including those with physical ailments, the elderly, the poor, and the socially and economically marginalised. And we also know climate change has become the basis of a slew of psychological afflictions of its own, including eco-anxiety, eco-paralysis, and solastalgia (a form of emotional or existential distress rendered by environmental changes), together with seeding general concerns in communities worldwide about their livelihoods, future, the future of their children, and their culture.

But let’s not forget that climate change’s multi-dimensional assault on reality as we know it also potentially includes being able to worsen existing mental health conditions.

A study published in 2023 in the journal GeoHealth reported that an extreme heat event in the Canadian province of British Columbia in 2021 affected people with schizophrenia more than those with kidney and heart disease. The study’s authors, of the British Columbia Centres for Disease Control and Health Canada, also wrote that people with mental health conditions seem to be at a greater risk of succumbing to heat-related deaths. The stakes were found to be even higher for people diagnosed with schizophrenia, anxiety or bipolar disorder.

During the eight-day extreme heat event in 2021, the province of British Columbia experienced temperatures as high as 40 degrees C when the average temperatures have been around 20 degrees C. The region recorded around 740 excess deaths during this heat wave.

To understand who was affected the most during this event, the researchers compared 1,614 deaths recorded over a month in 2021 with 6,524 deaths recorded in the same time period nine years ago. They analysed the data based on 26 medical conditions, including heart disease, schizophrenia, chronic kidney disease, dementia, depression, Parkinson’s disease, and osteoporosis.

The scientists wrote that they expected to find people with kidney and heart diseases to be most at risk, but were surprised to find that that dubious distinction belonged to people with schizophrenia. In particularly, they reported that 8% of the people surveyed in 2021 were previously diagnosed with schizophrenia as opposed to 2.7% of the people surveyed nine years ago. This was a 200% increase from a summer in which heat waves weren’t recorded.