It’s a topic that, on this side of the Atlantic, collects little data, but one that will probably require urgent attention in the years to come: the impact of climate disasters on our mental health. In the United States, more and more studies are interested in the effect that fires, hurricanes and repeated floods have on the brain. Eco-anxiety – that is, anxiety related to global warming – is not the only psychological indicator of the crisis. PTSD, most associated by the general public with soldiers or seriously injured people, is on the rise in the population as extreme events increase.
PTSD occurs after traumatic events. They can be very disabling, causing moral suffering and sometimes physical complications. The life of the affected person is altered. “The symptoms are multiple, explains the psychiatrist Guillaume Fond, teacher and researcher at the university hospitals of Marseille. They include sleep disturbances, but also withdrawal. The person’s emotions will fluctuate and they can become very irritable. Finally, it is also possible that she enters in a depression characterized by suicidal ideation”.
These different symptoms can be triggered in the weeks, months or even years after the events. “In these cases we often speak of hypervigilance: the person is always very alert, alert, inhabited by a fear that does not abandon them,” adds Wissam El Hage, professor of adult psychiatry and post-traumatic stress specialist.
Lots of veterans
Reported in soldiers since ancient times, the concept of post-traumatic disorder was only clinically identified in the 1980s, after the damage caused by the Vietnam War among American veterans. It is now recognized that this condition can also affect the general population – its prevalence would be 5 to 12% among Americans – but it would be largely underestimated. In the case of climate disasters, in this case, it wasn’t until the mid-2000s that scientists linked them to possible symptoms of mental disorders.
It all started with Hurricane Katrina, one of the six strongest on record, which devastated the coasts of Louisiana and New Orleans in August 2005. More than 1,800 people died in the storm. But beyond this terrible human toll, Katrina had a lasting impact on the brains of Americans who lived through it. One after these events, New Orleans coroner Dr. Jeffrey Rouse noted in the New York Times that the number of suicides had jumped from 9 per 100,000 population before the hurricane to 26 per 100,000 during the last four months of 2005.
Thirteen years later, a study in the American scientific journal PNAS, conducted by Dr. Nick Obradovich, showed that Katrina had led to a 4% increase in mental disorders in affected populations. After the hurricane, “suicides and suicidal ideation more than doubled, with one in six people meeting criteria for a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder,” noted in the March 2017 report “Mental health and climate change” of the. American Psychological Association. The phenomenon even has a name in the United States: the “Katrina brain” – “the brain of Katrina”, in French.
The aftermath of Hurricane Irma
Since then, studies have multiplied in the United States. In 2021, a University of California San Diego publication showed that survivors of the 2018 campfire – which devastated more than 55,000 acres and claimed 63 lives in California – had post-traumatic stress levels similar to those found in veterans. These residents also had very high levels of anxiety and depression. “The amount of PTSD that we noticed in the individuals we observed was very significant,” al explained Washington Post Jioti Mishra, lead author of the study and a professor in the department of psychiatry at the UC San Diego School of Medicine. We’ve usually found these levels in veterans, but now we’re seeing them in communities where people are exposed to wildfires. It shows how climate change has become a mental health stressor.”
Guillaume Fond has been warning about the phenomenon for several years. In 2019, in an editorial signed with four other psychiatrists and doctors specialized in public health (Marc Masson, Christophe Lançon, Pascal Aquier and Laurent Boyer) published in the reference journal in psychiatry Brain, drew attention to the links between psychiatry and global warming. Increasingly recognized in the United States, the phenomenon is not yet widely studied in France. A situation all the more worrying since, even on French territory, extreme weather events are likely to occur more regularly than before… and have a significant psychological impact. Thus, after passing the‘Ouragan Irma in September 2018 on the island of Saint-Martin, 47% of people who attended medical-psychological consultations experienced anxiety disorders, 40% stress and 27% sleep disorders. Almost a third of these people had then started a psychological follow-up.
The need to create a registry
This situation has everything to not be an isolated event in the future. Thus, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, each additional degree of warming leads to a 7 percent increase in precipitation from thunderstorms and storms. “However, the more a person is confronted with one type of repeated traumatic event, the more likely they are to develop symptoms of post-traumatic syndrome,” notes Antoine Pelissolo, head of the psychiatry department at the Henri-Mondor hospital in Creteil ( Val-de -Marne).
But managing post-traumatic stress is complex. “The disorders are often intense and resistant to treatment, notes Antoine Pelissolo. But early support can help avoid symptoms. In these cases, the most effective therapy is often EMDR.” This technique, also called cognitive-behavioral therapy, requires the affected person to remember the traumatic event experienced by answering the professional’s questions. “Pharmacological treatments are also a possible option, but it should only be a last resort, to avoid excessive consumption, and therefore addiction,” continues the specialist. Another risk that one runs, however, must be sought further upstream. “Many people affected by post-traumatic stress, especially when it is linked to a climate disaster, are not even detected, adds the psychiatrist. This tendency is all the more marked in children, who often have more difficulty verbalizing their malaise. “
To improve their care, more and more specialists are considering setting up a register of people subjected to intense climatic events. “This would allow us to list people and have a real following, as could have been done after the Paris attacks”, Wissam El Hage advances. Better inventory, better deal.
