Worsening human-induced climate change may have effects beyond the widely reported sea level rise, higher temperatures, and impacts on food supply and migration, and may also extend to influencing mental distress. among high school students in the United States.
According to a representative survey of 38,616 high school students from 22 public school districts in 14 US states, the quarter of teenagers who had experienced the most days in a climate disaster in the last two years and in the last five years, such as hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, droughts and wildfires, were 20% more likely to develop mental distress than their peers who experienced few or no disasters.
The article is the first large-scale research to examine adolescent mental health following multiple disaster events, including the timing, frequency, and duration of the events, spanning 83 federally declared climate disasters that occurred within the 10 years before the survey was completed. The findings, using May 2019 data on sadness/hopelessness and poor sleep from the U.S. Youth Risk Behavior Survey and disaster data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, were published this month in the magazine. Preventive Medicine Reports.
“We know that climate change has and will have catastrophic impacts around the world,” said lead author Amy Auchincloss, PhD, associate professor of epidemiology at the Dornsife School of Public Health. “But we were alarmed to discover that weather-related disasters were already affecting so many teenagers in the US. For example, in the past two years, many school districts in our study were subject to weather disasters for more than 20 days.” .
Respondents reported mental health problems by responding affirmatively to persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness and short sleep duration, two factors that previous studies strongly link to mental health disorders among adolescents. The group controlled for other factors that can influence mental health, such as age, race, gender, experience with bullying, concerns about school safety and household income.
A positive, but not statistically significant, link was also found between experiencing climate disasters and mental distress during the ten years preceding the US Youth Risk Survey.
“We found the strongest effects on mental distress in the two years immediately following a climate disaster, and the effect gradually weakened five to 10 years after the disaster,” said co-author Josiah Kephart, PhD, assistant professor in the School Dornsife. of Public Health.
Since the results cannot prove causality, the authors say they would like to see more studies on the range of effects of climate change on young people and methods to improve preparedness for possible worsening mental health among this population.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, about half of adolescents have already experienced a mental health disorder in their childhood or adolescence.
“Youth mental health crisis resources are already struggling to meet demand, and demand will increase as disasters increase,” said co-author Esther Chernak, MD, clinical professor and director of the Center for Public Health Preparedness and Communication. from the Dornsife School of Public Health. Health. “The current study is evidence that clinicians, policymakers, parents, and many others interested in youth mental health can point to when advocating for increasing adolescent-specific mental health resources, particularly in the low-income communities that will be most affected by disasters.”
Drexel's Dornsife School of Public Health is home to important ongoing work addressing health and climate change. Among other projects, the school's Urban Health Collaborative recently received funding from the National Institutes of Health to support the establishment of the Drexel Climate Change and Urban Health Research Center (CCUH), which will foster research on the effects of change Climate on health in the Americas. The Urban Health Project in Latin America (SALURBAL-Climate), of which the Dornsife School of Public Health is an institutional partner, funds research on the links of climate change to health and the impacts of health inequity in Latin America using data from up to 400 cities in 11 countries. Additional work at the school, in collaboration with the World Resources Institute (WRI), WRI Brazil, SALURBAL and WRI Mexico, seeks to deepen our understanding of the relationship between neighborhood-scale heat mortality and the social characteristics of neighborhoods in two Brazilian cities; whose findings are intended to inform public policies.
In addition to Auchincloss, other authors of the study include Dominic A. Ruggiero and Meghan T. Donnelly, who were graduate students at Drexel at the time of this work.