Focus on climate change and mental health

The wide-ranging review, which runs to 57 pages, notes that over the past decade, the evidence base highlighting the multiple interconnections between climate change and mental health has strengthened considerably.

Big picture thinking

To encourage ‘big picture’ thinking, the review includes a framework of the factors determining mental health in relation to climate change, starting from a ‘local level’ and expanding globally. This includes: 

• Demographic and personal traits, such as pre-existing conditions, ethnicity and personal traits.
• Individual psychology and lifestyle factors, such as emotional responses and personal values.
• Social and community networks, such as collective actions, and social values.
• Living and working conditions.
• Environmental, socioeconomic, political and cultural conditions.

The review provides examples of the mental health impacts, including post traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression, associated with extreme weather events around the world, from the US and Colombia, to the UK, India and Australia.

Acting on climate change

As well as generating psychological distress, the review says that strong emotional responses to the climate crisis can also motivate action. And the paper provides some examples of how individuals and communities can cope with and act on climate change. 

These include schemes that: 

• Help individuals to understand and process their emotional and psychological responses to climate change.
• Support individuals and communities to build resilience, develop coping strategies, shift their mindsets, and gain control.
• Build social connections through effective community-led programmes, including indigenous knowledge in climate solutions.
• Develop capacity and resilience at the community level to provide support for mental health issues related to extreme weather and climate events.

Feelings of young people

As well as the review, the special issue includes a paper with the collected feelings and hopes of 23 young people, who are concerned about climate change, from 15 countries around the world. 

Despite the diversity of the young people taking part, the paper notes: “We share a wide range of deeply uncomfortable climate-related feelings, including worry, sorrow, grief, fear, anger, hopelessness and  responsibility. These feelings tend to persist over time, increasing when we experience climate impacts, when we hear of them happening overseas, or when we are reminded of the inaction of political and corporate  leaders.”

Many of those contributing to the paper can vividly describe tragic experiences of heatwaves, droughts, floods and storms which have destroyed livelihoods, families, communities and homelands. This ranges from low-lying countries, such as the Philippines and Jamaica, where people worry that their homeland may not be habitable in the future, to those in drought-prone regions of India, Egypt, Nigeria and Kenya, who fear the impacts of drought and famine on the wellbeing of people in their communities. Suicide among subsistence farmers is a particular concern noted.

Feelings are also affected by responses to the crisis. Despair and anger when leaders fail to act, but a sense of connection, comfort and relief when it seems the main actors are taking climate change seriously.

The young people also list out numerous helpful and harmful responses to climate related feelings (see box).

The International Review of Psychiatry, Volume 34, Issue 5 (2022) contains 15 commentaries and review articles on climate change and mental health in total.