How the Mental Health Community Is Bracing for the Impact of Climate Change

When San Francisco broke heat records in 2017, with 106-degree temperatures in September, psychiatrist Robin Cooper didn’t hear until after the fact that one of her patients had been feeling dizzy and feverish. One day, he’d fainted in his poorly ventilated workspace. Emergency room doctors had surmised he’d had a virus. But Cooper warned him it could actually be a drug she’d prescribed him interacting with the extreme heat. Certain antipsychotic medications, often used in treating schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, can impair the body’s ability to cool itself. This is one reason hospitalization rates among schizophrenic patients can spike with the temperature. “I told him, you need to know these medications put you at risk during heat waves,” Cooper says. “He now is armed with that knowledge the next time around.”

“Historians will say that groups of people have faced
very difficult, tumultuous times,” says one psychiatrist.
“But human beings have never faced this before.” 

With temperatures rising globally, there will be increasingly frequent “next times.” The potential danger of heat-drug interactions is just one reason concern is growing about the impact of climate change on mental health. The fourth federally mandated National Climate Assessment, released in late 2018, lists mental health consequences and stress among the outcomes driven by increased temperatures, extreme weather and sea-level rise. “The last two years, the conversation has shifted toward climate change,” says Reggie Ferreira, editor of the journal Traumatology and director of Tulane University’s Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy. “We see disaster causing trauma, but climate change is intensifying the disaster. We need to focus on what’s intensifying these disasters and get people prepared.”

Read the story from Rolling Stone by Andrea Marks - “How the Mental Health Community Is Bracing for the Impact of Climate Change.”