FOSSIL FUELS, ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE, AND MENTAL HEALTH
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Mental health is not everyone's first thought when making connections between the environment and human health; but it is hardly surprising that our mental wellbeing as well as our physical condition is dependent upon the world around us and the food, air, water, and ecosystems that support us and our societies. Climate change is already having a profound effect on our mental health, through its direct impacts as well as its consequences for social support systems, while the local environmental degradation wrought both by a changing climate and the industrial efforts to extract yet more fossil fuels that we cannot afford to burn causes a more chronic form of distress that researchers are only beginning to explore.
However, efforts to mitigate climate change can also serve to preserve and improve our living and working spaces to make them more supportive of mental wellbeing, with measures like more green and wild spaces in living areas helping to sequester carbon, reduce air pollution, increase active travel, and improve mental health at a single stroke. Moreover, there is hope that the very efforts needed to create more sustainable methods of living - communities coming together to protect their local environment and resist its exploitation - might itself lead to better mental health, forging stronger social networks and a closer relationship with the natural environment. |
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Key points
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Extreme weather and mental health
If the most obvious health effects of climate change come from the natural disasters and extreme weather events that are becoming the new normal under our changing climate, then their mental health impacts too are probably the most striking. It is perhaps unsurprising that events like floods, hurricanes, and droughts could result in conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, or exacerbate psychotic or depressive illnesses. What is perhaps less obvious, however, is the magnitude of these impacts and the amount of time they last after the initial event. While the initial mental health morbidity caused by natural disasters like the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans was significant, research suggests that mental-health conditions such as PTSD and depression worsened over time. 18 months after the hurricane struck, over 20% of New Orleans residents interviewed reported symptoms of PTSD, 14% suffering from serious mental illness. Impacts of a similar size have been found in child and adolescent populations suffering the effects of cyclones in the South Pacific. Flooding from other causes has also long been associated with detrimental impacts, causing depression and anxiety in adults, and emotional disturbance and aggression in children; again, these effects last long after the flooding itself has resolved.
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At the opposite end of the spectrum of environmental disturbance, drought has also been shown to cause increased levels of distress, especially in rural areas. Research from the Australian drought of the late 2000s showed these impacts were felt especially amongst farming communities whose economic wellbeing was directly harmed by the changing environmental conditions, but also amongst groups who were not directly materially hurt by the drought. Rising temperatures, meanwhile, are associated with higher rates of suicides, with each 1C rise above 18C in the UK linked to a 3.8% increase in suicide rates.
While it is implausible to hope that such events could happen with no ill effects, the mental health burden of extreme weather and natural disasters is compounded by the lack of robust mental health services, or their disturbance by environmental factors. These climatic perturbations of social systems can also have serious effects outside the context of acute weather events. |
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Fragility and resilience: climate change as threat multiplier for mental health
Much of the mental health toll of natural disasters comes not directly from the destruction itself, but from the resultant collapse of the social support systems necessary for maintaining mental health. Strong social support networks can mitigate much of the health costs of disasters even of the size of Hurricane Katrina; it is important that aid responses do not inadvertently disrupt these through poorly-planned evacuation or rebuilding policies. Psychological distress induced by the downstream impacts of climatic impacts on social systems play out in a variety of ways, the effects falling disproportionately on individuals who are already vulnerable, especially Indigenous people and those living in low-resource settings.
Extreme heat exposure reduces agricultural labourers' work capacity, creating socioeconomic hardship and subsequent psychological problems. Where drought and desertification cause crop failure, meanwhile, the stresses on farming communities lead to elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide. In fragile states these impacts can amplify beyond local communities if they lack sufficient adaptive capacity to maintain food supply in the face of such disturbances, resulting in food insecurity and even violent conflict - both major causes of mental ill health.
An additional source of potential psychological damage comes from the effects of forced migration that is likely to result from climate change. While the poor mental health of migrants and refugees in part arises from pre-displacement trauma (the reasons for their original displacement), a range of post-displacement factors further threaten mental wellbeing. Fragmentation of social networks and loss of social capital, economic deprivation and hardship, inadequate housing, mandatory detention, and hostile host environments all provide further psychological stressors, exacerbated by barriers to access to mental health services in the states where they arrive, and difficulties in transcultural communication and intervention. As a consequence, mental illness prevalence is higher amongst asylum seekers than in the general population; they are 10 times more likely to suffer PTSD, and significantly more likely to experience somatic symptoms.
Extreme heat exposure reduces agricultural labourers' work capacity, creating socioeconomic hardship and subsequent psychological problems. Where drought and desertification cause crop failure, meanwhile, the stresses on farming communities lead to elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide. In fragile states these impacts can amplify beyond local communities if they lack sufficient adaptive capacity to maintain food supply in the face of such disturbances, resulting in food insecurity and even violent conflict - both major causes of mental ill health.
An additional source of potential psychological damage comes from the effects of forced migration that is likely to result from climate change. While the poor mental health of migrants and refugees in part arises from pre-displacement trauma (the reasons for their original displacement), a range of post-displacement factors further threaten mental wellbeing. Fragmentation of social networks and loss of social capital, economic deprivation and hardship, inadequate housing, mandatory detention, and hostile host environments all provide further psychological stressors, exacerbated by barriers to access to mental health services in the states where they arrive, and difficulties in transcultural communication and intervention. As a consequence, mental illness prevalence is higher amongst asylum seekers than in the general population; they are 10 times more likely to suffer PTSD, and significantly more likely to experience somatic symptoms.
The age of solastalgia
Landscape of the Upper Hunter Valley, New South Wales, transformed by open-cut coal mining. Image: Jeremy Buckingham via Flickr
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It is not only through disaster and social collapse that an exploitative, extractive, high-carbon society worsens our mental well-being, however. Climate change, pollution, ever-more destructive methods of fossil fuel extraction and refinement - all of these factors are changing the environments in which communities have grown and people live. These changes are leaving people homesick without ever leaving their homes - through witnessing their homes transformed in front of them by changing weather patterns, industrial development, or mining.
Australian psychiatrist Glenn Albrecht has dubbed this phenomenon solastalgia, "the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment". He first noticed the dependence of mental health on our natural environments while working with communities in the Hunter Valley region of New South Wales as its landscape was transformed by expanding open-cut coal mining ventures (pictured left). Building on this observation, researchers found that residents' sense of place, their identity, physical and mental health and general wellbeing were all challenged by the unwelcome change wrought by coal extraction. Their distress was exacerbated by a feeling of powerlessness in influencing the processes wreaking this destruction on their homes. Other researchers also discovered this effect at work across Australia, where fossil fuel dependence was shaping the environment in a different way, through climate change-induced drought. This environmental destruction is being inflicted on already-marginalised groups, poorer rural and Indigenous communities who have more reliance upon and a stronger relationship with the natural environment, and who benefit least from such unrestricted extractivism. This pattern is repeated elsewhere throughout the world. In the Pacific islands, it is due to rising sea-levels and changing temperatures; in Canada, it is the loss of the lush boreal forests of Alberta, cleared by oil sands projects that consider it no more than 'overburden' (just one of the many psychosocial harms of the tar sands industry); and across the world, oil spills like the Exxon-Valdez incident cause anxiety and distress, especially in Indigenous populations. |
Happier and healthier: mental health benefits of environmental protection
While environmental change poses serious risks to psychological wellbeing, efforts to create a more sustainable society could be key to better promotion of mental health. An excellent illustration of this is the effect of increasing green spaces like parks in urban environments. Creating such spaces increases carbon sequestration, reduces air pollution, regulates air temperatures (counteracting the urban heat-island effect), and increases the modal share of active transport (see the page on the built environment for more details). And access to such space has cobenefits for mental health, reducing symptoms of depression, stress, and anxiety.
Moreover, it is thought that just being involved in efforts to protect the environment and the communities who live within it can have mental health benefits. The grassroots groups that form around such goals help build strong, resilient social networks, an important determinant of psychological wellbeing. And by fostering an engagement with the natural environment and the psychologically and culturally mediated connections between people and natural systems, encouraging people to perceive and interact with nature, there is scope for such movements to improve mental wellbeing on a range of dimensions, with lower rates of fatigue and distress, better family dynamics, and improved self-reported wellbeing. A term has even been coined to describe this - soliphilia - a hopeful counterpart to solastalgia. As with physical health, while global environmental change poses a major threat to global health, responding to it may be our greatest opportunity for healthier, more sustainable societies.
Moreover, it is thought that just being involved in efforts to protect the environment and the communities who live within it can have mental health benefits. The grassroots groups that form around such goals help build strong, resilient social networks, an important determinant of psychological wellbeing. And by fostering an engagement with the natural environment and the psychologically and culturally mediated connections between people and natural systems, encouraging people to perceive and interact with nature, there is scope for such movements to improve mental wellbeing on a range of dimensions, with lower rates of fatigue and distress, better family dynamics, and improved self-reported wellbeing. A term has even been coined to describe this - soliphilia - a hopeful counterpart to solastalgia. As with physical health, while global environmental change poses a major threat to global health, responding to it may be our greatest opportunity for healthier, more sustainable societies.
