NEW YORK – Of the broad range of direct and indirect threats to public health anticipated from climate change, those involving mental health will place psychiatrists on the front lines of efforts to mitigate the impact, a member of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance said at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association.
“One thing climate changes mean for us in psychiatry is more work,” reported Janet L. Lewis, MD, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester (N.Y.).
Mental health is sensitive to climate. “Psychiatric patients can be particularly vulnerable to the medical effects of climate change,” Dr. Lewis said. “People with schizophrenia exhibit impaired thermoregulatory functioning, and many of our medications can impair the body’s normal heat regulation.”
The evidence of increased death rates among schizophrenia patients during heat waves has been attributed to this phenomenon as well as to the failure of patients with mental disorders to seek or obtain relief from heat, according to Dr. Lewis, but she noted that These links are true for the individual, and they affect trends in communities.
As a cause of societal stresses, such as food and water insecurity, climate change also has the very real potential of producing traumatic disruptions commensurate with disasters such as hurricanes or earthquakes. Noting that the rate of PTSD after such natural disasters typically runs at around 30%, Dr. Lewis suggested that psychiatrists might face large challenges from major upheavals induced by climate change.
However, even in the absence of catastrophic consequences, significant psychiatric morbidity may be generated by climate change in the form of “ecoanxieties” or “solastalgia,” a term coined about 10 years ago to describe psychic anxiety induced by environmental change. While many individuals continue to function normally despite fear or anxiety about climate change, Dr. Lewis said that there are many reports in the literature now show that psychoterratic illness, another term for this phenomenon, is associated with degraded or threatened environments linked to climate change.
The Climate Psychiatry Alliance is one of several professional psychiatry groups that is engaged in evaluating how psychiatry as a profession should react to climate change. The Climate Psychiatry committee of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry is another. Dr. Lewis, addressing the potential criticism that climate is a political issue, said that “we bring some very particular things to this 21st-century disaster … hopefully, everything I have said about the mental effects of climate change convinces you that it is not just a political problem.”