Climate change is not just bad for the planet and for our bodies. According to a new report, climate change is bad for our health too. The report is not the first to tackle climate change from a health perspective. Earlier this year a Consortium on Climate and Health issued a report detailing the many ways climate change can negatively impact human health and well-being. What makes this new report unique is its narrow focus on mental health.

    The report breaks up the mental health impacts into two broad buckets: acute impacts such as those from discrete climate related shocks (like fires, floods, and storms) and chronic impacts, or the more gradual ways that climate change can impact our well-being.

    It is important that we recognize that up to fourty percent of people who live through a disaster experience some kind of psychopathology. This includes anxiety, despression, mood disorders, and posttraumatic stress discorder (PTSD).

    According to the report, one in six people who lived in areas affected by Hurricane Katrina met the criteria for PTSD. Similary, suicide and suicidal ideation more than doubled in those regions, and 49 percent of people developed an anxiety or mood disorder like depression. The issue is not just disaster itself - most of us can cope with a single source of stress. But in disaster situations, stressors multiply rapidly. You may have lost not just your home, but your job, and perhaps even the broader community that you ordinarily relied on for support. And under climate change scenarios, it could mean that you are extirpated from your home permanently.

    Chronic effects are harder to envision, but no less dangerous. As the climate continues to change, for example, many locations will be warmer for longer portions of the year - anyone who has experienced this usually warm winter knows this firsthand. But if the weather gets to sticky, we tend to retreat indoors, making it harder (even in this digital age) to build and maintain much needed social networks. Similary, as temperatures soar, studies suggest our tempers do as well, which can further threaten community cohesiveness.

Adapted from http://www.popsci.com/climate-change-mental-illness (accessed 2 April 2017)

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(SOAL UM UGM 2017)