Name: Is climate change affecting our mental health? | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2024-06-09T20:26:05.000Z
Duration: 6 min 12 s
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When it comes to extreme weather and climate change, we often focus on how it will impact our futures and the world we live in.

UN scientists are warning we are on course for devastating changes to our climate.

Basic passive voice

They say the world is expected to warm above 1.5 degrees Celsius by the early 2030s.

But researchers are now starting to understand that it's also already affecting our mental health.

Climate change is bearing directly on brain health, on mental health, on our inner psychology, right?

Climate change is changing us from the inside out.

In the UK, one in four adults and one in 10 children experience mental illness, and there's growing evidence that dealing with a changing climate is adding to that burden.

We know a lot more about the physical impacts of climate change, but we're now starting to get a better appreciation and understanding of how climate change impacts mental health.

In the UK, the patterns of change in temperatures in particular are very stark.

In 2022, we had the hottest year on record where daytime temperatures soared over 40 degrees for the first time in history.

The past hour or so, we've had the UK Met office issuing its first ever red warning for extreme heat.

After the 2022 heat wave in the UK, Charles and a team of researchers set out to study how the extreme heat affected people's wellbeing.

Over half of the people they spoke to experienced negative impacts on their mental health due to the heat.

People talk about things like experiencing severe anxiety and emotional distress, general irritability, bad moods, a sense of isolation from having to stay indoors.

A lot of these impacts could be linked to sleep disruption.

Lack of sleep was one of the most commonly cited impacts.

They saw their parks and local green areas totally dried out by the heat and it triggered climate anxiety.

A lot of people manage their stress by going for a run or doing something outdoors.

And when you're unable to do that, the pressure just mounts and mounts.

We don't have air conditioning, all that kind of thing.

So then you're awake at night, everyone's tired.

And it's so difficult when you go to workplace and when you try to come up with different ideas, you're so low mentally.

All of these stressors, they influence our ability to cope.

They influence our ability to make decisions, to interact with the world in the way that we would otherwise be interacting with it.

Clayton has interviewed numerous doctors and scientists who are looking at how the changing environment is affecting our minds, brains, and bodies.

One of the things we're learning is that you don't even need to be alive to experience some of these effects.

A study of expecting mothers who experienced Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the huge storm that hit New York, showed that in unborn children who did experience that storm, girls as early as preschool were 20 times as likely to experience anxiety, 30 times as likely to experience depression.

Boys were 60 times as likely relative to those who had not been exposed to the storm in utero to express some kind of ADHD.

Charles's research also saw the heat affecting men and women differently, often due to societal factors such as traditional gender roles.

For example, he found that when schools closed early on the hottest day of the year in 2022, the ones to pick up the gaps in the childcare were, you guessed it, women.

This added to the mental strain many women faced.

One of the stories told to us was from a lady who lives in a deprived area of the city.

And the hottest day of the year, she watched the readings on the thermometer in the baby's room just going up and up and up.

And so it was really stressful for the mother trying to manage the situation.

We know that babies haven't fully developed the ability to self-regulate their own temperatures.

So these extreme temperatures can be fatal.

Charles's research found that people on lower incomes and other disadvantaged groups were more likely to feel the negative effects of extreme heat because it was harder for them to keep their homes cool.

So on a very basic level, people with more income have more resources to cope during these sorts of periods.

It's true across countries around the world.

In the case of Hurricane Katrina, for example, the huge storm that struck New Orleans in the United States in 2005, an academic study that looked at the experience of low-income people in that storm showed that about half of these folks experienced some kind of post-traumatic stress, and that's relative to 5% of the general population.

As well as the direct effects of climate change on people's mental health, there's also knock-on effects like loss of income and rising prices, which inevitably have implications for people's wellbeing.

There's droughts in the fields, which causes shortage of foods, and we've seen food prices go up because of shortages.

When I live on my own, will I be able to afford, you know, the good food that keeps me healthy?

They're serious and they can be scary, but I don't think this is a story of doom and gloom.

Being able to come to an awareness of the relationships between climate change and brain health, it affords us an ability to paint a picture of a future that we desire.

So although the impacts of a changing climate on our mental health can be profound, both Clayton and Charles' research has shown that there are things you can do to support your wellbeing.

Engaging with nature, so spending more time in green space.

People use that as a way to cope with stress.

Social connection is a really big one as well.

We are not separate from our environment.

We are connected, not just to the world around us, but of course, to one another.

 And it is only in working with one another that we're going to be able to move forward.

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Is climate change affecting our mental health? | BBC Ideas

anxiety

mental

depression

engage