The Mental Repercussions of Climate Change
Words by Alexi Barnstone
This article is part of PULPCLIMATE week. CLICK HERE to join the facebook group. University of Sydney Students will be marching from Fischer Library at 10:00 AM on the 20th of September.
On the second to last Tuesday in July 13-year-old Heydi Gámez García was taken off life support. She had been pronounced braindead after an attempted suicide a couple of weeks earlier.
Heydi was a Honduran refugee. She had been sent away from her home country by her father, Manuel Gámez, because of political instability and violence. She and her sister, Zoila, received asylum in the US. Her father did not. She had not seen him in four years. Having been consistently rebuffed by US immigration Manuel Gámez had long awaited a reunion with his daughter. When it came it was not the reunion he had wanted.
As Heydi’s father clutched the hand of his motionless daughter in a hospital bed in Queens, he told CNN that if he could talk to her, if she could hear him, he would say "Please forgive me for failing you, I'm sorry I couldn't be there... I never meant to leave you."
Heydi was in a foreign environment, isolated from her network of friends and her family. Zoila remembers hearing Heydi crying while on the phone to her father, “you will never make it” she was saying.
This is one tragic case that speaks to a systemic issue. Heydi, like so many others, experienced the mental anguishes that so often follow forced migration. Mental anguishes that costed her life.
Forced migration has a massive impact on mental health. Studies in psychology have shown correlations between forced migration and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, Depression, and Anxiety among other mental afflictions.
And the rate of forced migration will only intensify. Among the plethora of other dystopias promised by climate change, the cataclysmic creep of our fossil-fuelled Anthropocene is projected to displace 143 million people by the year 2050, according to a World Bank report. Between forced migration and natural disasters such as flooding, storms, wildfires, and heatwaves, climate change is the greatest current threat to humanity’s mental health.
In a 2017 report titled Mental Health and Our Climate: Impacts, Implications and Guidance the American Psychiatric Association addressed the issue. In a recent meta-analysis 7 – 40 % of all people subjected to climate disasters showed a form of psychopathology. Acute and chronic mental health effects included trauma and shock, post-traumatic stress disorder, compounded stress, strains on social relationships, depression, anxiety, suicide, substance abuse, aggression and violence, loss of personally important places, loss of autonomy and control, loss of personal and occupational identity, feelings of helplessness, fear, fatalism, solastalgia, and ecoanxiety.
The gradual impacts of climate change, like changes in weather and rising sea levels, will cause some of the most resounding chronic psychological consequences, including depression and alcoholism. Changing weather and rising sea levels will lead to forced migration. Unlivable land will force millions into a new and burgeoning category, that of the climate refugee.
Stress is a predictor for suicide, and refugees experience unfathomable levels compared to the general population. Refugees are often ethnic minorities in their country of refuge, which exposes them to the added stress caused by cultural disparities. Interestingly, however, research into the causes for refugee and asylum seeker stress has found that the most common source of stress was the asylum process itself.
Although the catalyst for forced migration may be different from the case of Heydi, the result could very well be the same.
It may seem odd, at this juncture, that the mainstream media does not discuss the mental ramifications of climate change more. Unfortunately, the explanation for this lies at the core of the field of psychiatry.
Climate change is an extraordinarily politicised issue. Partisan lines are drawn between belief and disbelief on the topic. In polling released by the Pew Research Center titled The Politics of Climate Change in the United States 15% of conservative Republicans were found to believe that humans are responsible for warming the planet and 79% of democrats. The political fissures that exist around the topic are conspicuous. Such partisanship creates an issue for the field of psychiatry. Psychiatry and the APA must remain apolitical. Mental health transcends political affiliation. To take a position on the issue would be to risk isolating people from the field based on political belief. However, the APA and psychiatrists the world over are also sworn to the Hippocratic oath. They must do what is within the best interest of the patient. Mitigating the impacts of climate change will also mitigate the mental health repercussions.
It is in this chasm that psychiatry finds itself. Caught in an ethical dilemma between care for the patient and the patients’ beliefs. As a result, the APA walks the fine line between climate change activism and advocacy for patients. It is less vocal about the issues around mental health and climate change for fear of the partisan divide, and as consequence coverage of the mental health concerns sees less light in the public eye.
Certain sects within psychiatry have begun to form their own organisations to further the narrative around mental health and climate change. The Climate Psychiatry Alliance, a group of psychiatrists and psychologists, demand action be taken on climate change to mitigate the mental health impacts. Organisations such as these rise up to force the conversation forward.
This being said, as the projected impacts of climate change become direr the APA has begun to engage more fully. The 2017 mental health report was a monumental step in the right direction. President of the APA Altha Stewart, in a 2018 statement, said she “proposed that we work toward a strategy of forming effective alliances instead of standalone efforts to address the full breadth of this issue and to focus on creating a mechanism for long-term sustainability of our joint efforts beyond ‘disaster psychiatry.’”
Climate change is the greatest threat to mental health that currently exists. Its scope is ill-defined, but its promise is large.