The impacts of climate change are being felt worldwide as record heat waves, drought, floods, and more intense hurricanes devastate communities and livelihoods, placing additional burdens on emergency response agencies. Yet these agencies often provide little or no mental health support for people affected by such natural disasters, says Autumn Carson, Highstead Communications Associate, in her recent master’s thesis. And while conversations about the effects of the climate crisis on human health are growing, she writes, “there is a startling lack of policy or adaptation strategies addressing the role of climate change and its impacts on human mental health and psychological health.”
Carson, who recently earned a master of natural resources degree from Virginia Tech University’s Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability, shared her research findings, recommendations, and reasons for delving into a topic with scant scholarly research.
A 2022 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change revealed that rapidly increasing climate change poses a rising threat to mental health and psychosocial well-being, from emotional distress to anxiety, depression, grief, and suicidal ideation.
“I’m convinced this is going to be a growing topic of conversation as climate change becomes more and more disruptive to our everyday lives,” says Carson. While physical injuries and mortality rates often receive the most attention and aid funds, her research revealed the number of people who experience mental health issues due to a natural disaster often outweighs those with physical injuries by 40:1. Following climate-related events, mental health problems increase among both people with no history of mental illness and those at risk, she says.
These days, terms like eco-anxiety, eco-grief, green depression, and climate anxiety are being used to describe the impacts of climate change on the human psyche. However, a 2021 survey conducted by the World Health Organization found that only nine of 95 countries surveyed had national health and climate change plans that included mental health and psychosocial support.
Carson wants to change that. She proposes creating a new federal agency, the Department of Climate Psycho-Social Health Services (DCPHS), because, she says, “this is only going to become an increasing issue. Climate change will only invade and disrupt our lives more and more.” The agency could serve as the host organization for all state-specific behavioral and psychosocial programs, plans, and strategies. Federal funds could be used to work with existing state programs and to help develop strategies in states that don’t have them. The DCPHS could be responsible for developing standards for all statewide climate-psychosocial programs and conducting reviews at least every five years to ensure programs maintain those standards.
She proposes that DCPHS partner with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to train, equip, and deploy emergency-certified mental health professionals to areas grappling with natural disasters and/or severe climate events. DCPHS would also allocate federal funds to train first responders and other key community members, starting with cities and counties most vulnerable to climate risks.
Following Her Heart
As a passionate environmentalist and mental health advocate, Carson realized there was minimal research on the intersection of mental health and the environment, despite their interconnectedness.
“I was hungry for more, but there wasn’t more for me to get,” says Carson, who co-hosts a mental health podcast and has had her own struggles with mental illness. As a young Black woman, she’s acutely aware of the disparities within the U.S. mental healthcare system and the stigma around mental illness, especially in communities of color. “During my sophomore year of college, I had my first panic attack and couldn’t understand what was going on with me. I thought I was dying,” she says. “Growing up, mental health just wasn’t something that was talked about, and when it was, it was in a very taboo way. This is not an uncommon experience, especially for people of color and men.”
A study published by the Journal of Health of Social Behavior revealed that more than one out of every three people don’t want to be friends or neighbors with someone who has a mental illness, and nearly 70 percent of people don’t want someone with a mental illness to marry into their family, Carson writes.
Taboo keeps people from self-reporting mental illness, and the infrastructure isn’t in place to report on the mental health impacts of climate change, she says. “In order for there to be self-reporting, there has to be self-awareness, and self-awareness is more of a challenge when you aren’t equipped with the relevant knowledge, tools, or language from a young age.” While climate change impacts everyone, it disproportionately affects communities of color – the very communities most likely not to have mental health treatment due to a lack of access, stigma, or both.
According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in five Americans is diagnosed with a mental illness, which is likely a conservative statistic due to underreporting. And 53% of those who are diagnosed did not receive treatment within the past year, according to a Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration survey.
Case Studies
Through her research, Carson identified three communities that provided mental health support following climate-related disasters. By training community members to provide psychosocial support to survivors of such disasters, Puerto Rico, Nebraska, and Southern California communities developed multiple relevant, adaptable, culturally informed psychosocial resilience strategies to serve their residents.
These examples suggest that addressing the mental health effects of climate change is necessary and possible. She says in 10, 15, or 20 years, “we will be grateful that we established a federal program like this to handle this new issue for which there’s no existing department. I don’t think it’s as long of a shot as I originally thought. As time goes on, this will be a glaring issue, and relevant policies and strategies will need to be established.”