The largely unacknowledged impact of climate change on mental health

ABSTRACT

In all of the coverage of climate change in the popular press, relatively little attention has been paid to one aspect: mental health. Rising seawaters, increasingly strong storms, and more ferocious droughts caused by climate change are not only devastating to physical infrastructure but also affect human beings in other ways as well: people lose their homes, their jobs, their family members, and their communities. Researchers have found that climate change can cause not only posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the trauma of displacement from extreme weather events such as Hurricane Katrina but also “pre-traumatic” stress disorder, or, moderate to extreme anxiety about a looming crisis. This paper describes some of these effects, who is most vulnerable to them, some of the social factors involved, and offers some suggestions for possible solutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• mental health
• natural disasters
• PTSD
• extreme weather

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes on contributors

Eva Gifford

Eva Gifford graduated from the University of British Columbia with a bachelor of arts in psychology in 2012, where she was involved in research on healthy aging and human emotion. She is currently completing a master’s degree in occupational therapy at McGill University, where she has worked with various populations in need, including older adults and those with mental health issues.

Robert Gifford

Robert Gifford is a professor of Psychology and Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Canadian Psychological Association, and the Association for Psychological Science, and the recipient of Career Awards from the Environmental Design Research Association and the American Psychological Association. Gifford is the author of over 125 refereed publications and book chapters, five editions of Environmental psychology: Principles and practice and editor of Research methods for environmental psychology. He has been the chief editor of the Journal of Environmental Psychology for 14 years, and has served as President of the Environmental Psychology division of the International Association of Applied Psychology, APA’s Population and Environment Division, and CPA’s environmental section.