Speaker at Sandor Lecture Discusses Climate Change’s Impact on Mental Health
| The mental health impacts of climate change and the importance of working as a community to mitigate them was the focus of the third annual Richard and Ellen Sandor Lecture Series on Medicine and Sustainability.
Susanne “Susi” Moser, Ph.D., a research scholar in the School of Environmental Studies at Antioch University New England, presented her lecture, “When Nothing’s Wrong with Us, but Everything is Changing Around Us,” March 4 in the Sam Walton Auditorium of the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Research Institute at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS).
Chicagoans Richard Sandor, Ph.D., a businessman, economist and entrepreneur, and his wife, Ellen Sandor, an artist who has works in the Smithsonian Institution, the International Center of Photography and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, sat in the front row. A generous gift from their family foundation to UAMS made the lecture series possible.
Moser began the lecture by telling the story of a man who repeatedly jumped into a raging river to rescue people who had fallen in, eventually getting other people along the shoreline involved to help the survivors. Finally, the man went upstream to find out why people kept falling in.
“This is a story that I only use to frame what it is like to work on climate change, day in and day out,” Moser said. “There’s work to do to pull people out of the river. There’s ‘people work’ to do, to try to heal the ones that you know have been injured in one way or another, and maybe not perpetuate whatever trauma they have going on. And then there’s the work of trying to prevent people from falling in, in the first place.”
Moser discussed how climate change can affect people mentally and physically. She said the drivers of climate change are rising temperatures, weather extremes and rising sea levels that manifest as severe weather, extreme heat, and water and food shortages, as well as the diseases and allergies that follow for people who live in the affected areas.
“It’s not like climate change intends these things, right, but it makes these things worse,” which is why mental health challenges are now recognized results of climate change, Moser said.
While injuries and fatalities are obvious impacts of hurricanes or tornadoes, she said there are also hidden costs to the people who are forced, as a result of the disasters, to leave the places they call home.
“It is the PTSD from these events that stays with people unless it is treated, and even with heat, extreme heat, we know now that it does actually affect people psychologically,” Moser said. “It makes their thinking worse. People are more aggressive, and those kinds of issues.”
There are also secondary impacts such as substance abuse and domestic violence, as well as increasing incidences of adverse childhood experiences, she said.
“If you are rich and can protect yourself from it, you’ll be in a much better place than if you are living in poverty,” she said, explaining that the effects of climate change often build on one another, leaving those who are vulnerable to begin with faced with additional needs that make both the existing and new problems overwhelming.
Moser said a quarter to a half of people who experience a tornado, a hurricane or a storm of any kind are more at risk of adverse mental health impacts such as anxiety, depression, PTSD, suicide and suicidal ideation, and almost half of adults and children experience depression after a natural disaster, with some turning to self-harm.
This has given rise to what is known as climate-driven anxiety, grief and burnout, “and it’s particularly high among young people and those with preexisting mental health issues,” Moser said. She said indigenous people, in particular, struggle with suddenly losing their connection to the land.
“They lose their sense of self,” she said. “It’s more difficult for them to relate to others. Often, they become isolated. They withdraw from others,” and a cycle of increased depression and isolation begins.
Moser said these observations are backed up by “some really good science,” and that the sense of helplessness is worse in developing countries with poor socioeconomic conditions.
Moser uses slides to help emphasize her points as she addresses the crowd in the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute at UAMS.
“You see these challenges globally,” she said. “And I want to emphasize that what’s happening right now is people feel abandoned by their governments because they want something done but nothing is happening. People are saying, ‘You’re not taking care of our future,’ despite the promises we all say as parents, as governments, and in our Constitution.”
Moser said she hasn’t seen an Arkansas-focused study on the impacts of climate change, but “you do have all the ingredients, right? This is the kind of experience you already see here — drought, people losing their livelihoods, farmers having a hard time raising cattle or corn or whatever. The bottom line is, you already have all the conditions that make it really, really difficult for people to withstand additional impacts from climate change.”
The mental health impacts are projected to worsen for people who are least able to protect themselves, Sandor said.
Addressing an audience of mostly medical professionals, Moser said statistics show that despite the public’s dwindling trust in some sources of information about climate change, such as politicians and journalists, trust in other professionals, including doctors, other medical professionals and scientists, is rising.
This is good news, she said, because “people will come to you and ask you how they are going to handle this,” yet the impacts of climate change on patients still isn’t part of most health care professionals’ training.
“People might not come to you and actually say it, right? They might display the symptoms, but they might not talk about it. So, you kind-of have to read between the lines.” In addition to recognizing the problem, she said, it’s important to understand that the patients’ reactions aren’t unusual, but “actually a healthy, normal, adequate response to a really bad problem.”
“What does not work in that situation? Platitudes,” she said. “That’s just not good enough. I’m sorry.” She said that advising someone to focus on something else is ineffective, because “the patients don’t always have the luxury of ‘tuning out.’”
As the director and principal researcher of her self-titled research and consulting business, she said that because so many people, including doctors, aren’t trained to handle the mental-health impacts of climate change, “we’re trying to fill the gap.”
“We’re trying to lean more on education,” she said, but acknowledged, “It’s a challenge.” It’s not something you’re just born with. It’s something you can acquire by talking to each other, learning from each other,” and being strong in order to help others.
“People want to know what’s purposeful, why am I here,” she said, adding that The Adaptive Mind Project, a professional development initiative that she founded, aims to help medical professionals and others develop skills to help those who are mentally impacted by climate change.
Through class sessions, support groups and workshops, she said, “We teach people how to think about and frame what is happening,” and to use “more of an emotional, psychological capacity” in providing services.
Moser said efforts to foster community and friendship will make the most dramatic impacts.
Mark Williams, Ph.D., dean of the UAMS Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health, said the lecture was important for medical professionals to hear because “climate change is reality. Health care practitioners are increasingly seeing greater numbers of patients exhibiting symptoms of physical and mental distress related to changing conditions. To deal with greater numbers of people in distress, we will need trained professionals and community resources.”
Williams agreed that “we are not presently adequately training health professionals to deal with climate change issues,” adding, “This will have to change.”
“But relying on the health professions will not be enough,” he noted. “Communities must begin to prepare to deal with the environmental, physical and mental health consequences that are occurring and will occur, from dealing with how heat will affect certain medications to treating higher numbers of heat stroke as the result of working outside in higher temperatures.
“Arkansas communities must have plans and personnel in place to deal with both short and long-term disasters, including high numbers of severe storms, prolonged drought, food shortages and so forth, Williams said.