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.”

Pediatricians are concerned about climate change, and here's why

Doctors have long raised alarm about the potential health risks of climate change, but it turns out that children are particularly vulnerable.

Children are estimated to bear 88% of the burden of disease related to climate change, according to a paper published Tuesday in the journal Pediatrics.

The new paper highlights some studies on the implications of climate change for children's health and then calls for the world to better prepare for these health risks, not just in the future but in the present.

Read the CNN story by Jacqueline Howard - “Pediatricians are concerned about climate change, and here's why.”

Fracking ban in the Northern Territory should stay, group of leading climate scientists says

Thirty-one of Australia's leading climate scientists and doctors have written an open letter to the Northern Territory Government calling on it to not permit the opening up of new gas fields through hydraulic fracturing.

The scientists say the estimated emissions rise
from developing one gas field is unacceptable.

The letter, coordinated by the Australia Institute think tank, also called on the Territory Government's fracking inquiry panel to recommend that new shale gas fields are too risky because of the consequences of potentially increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

The Territory Government will make a decision on whether to allow fracking of major shale gas reserves to resume after its inquiry delivers a final report next month.

"The NT is in the region likely to experience the most severe impacts of global warming, for example it is highly susceptible to temperature increases," wrote the scientists, including the CSIRO's Climate Change Hub leader Professor David Karoly.

Read the ABC News story by Jane Bardon - “Fracking ban in the Northern Territory should stay, group of leading climate scientists says.”

Doctors call on health super funds to pull $1.7 billion out of coal and oil companies

Hundreds of Victorian doctors and medical staff are pressuring their super funds to quit investing in coal and oil for the sake of health, as they did with tobacco five years ago.

Hundreds of medical staff in Victoria are pressuring
their super funds to divest from corporations that
are based on fossil fuels.

The group, which includes some of Australia's leading health experts, says there is overwhelming evidence that climate change is already making people sick and causing thousands of deaths.

They want the two largest health super funds, HESTA and First State, to divest from fossil fuel-based companies, arguing the nest eggs of the medical profession should not be built on industries that make people sick.

Combined, the two default health super funds have about $1.72 billion invested in these heavily fossil fuel-based companies, according to Market Forces, an environmental investment advisory group.

Read Adam Carey’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Doctors call on health super funds to pull $1.7 billion out of coal and oil companies.”

Severe storms, floods and your health fact sheet

Doctors for the Environment Australia has developed this fact sheet to detail the adverse effects of floods and storms on our health and simple measures for avoidance and treatment.

Such extreme weather events are becoming more frequent with climate change and are demanding and costly to health services and communities.

Read the Doctors for the Environment story - “Severe storms, floods and your health fact sheet.”

Anger over the arrival of a 'silent killer'

Some have described the heat as our “silent killer”.

Although we haven’t yet truly experienced what climate change will deal out, doctors and public health experts are calling on the Victorian Government to urgently review its management of heatwaves.

Today’s Melbourne Age in a story headed: “Anger over spike in deaths during record Victorian heatwave” that on just one day during the recent heatwave, Melbourne had recorded 139 deaths above its average.

Doctors are concerned that Victoria had not learnt enough from the catastrophic 2009 heatwave, when 374 lives were lost.

It was after that loss that the Victorian Greens had called for a formal inquiry into the state’s “clear lack of preparation” for periods of extreme heat.