An in depth friend of mine fled her home within the British Virgin Islands during Hurricane Irma in September 2017. He and his young family needed to seize their passports and never much else as they fled the 200mph winds. At the time, he described the destruction yesterday as “like a bomb going off”. Every hurricane season, he and plenty of others relive the trauma of the experience. Eight years later, the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica was particularly terrifying because global warming caused storm surges so quickly.
“Once the winds are stilled, anxiety and grief go away,” write psychology researchers Gulnaz Anjum and Modasar Aziz. “The fear, disconnection and exhaustion that follow a disaster of this scale is not far-fetched. They can shape lives for years.”
Anjum and Aziz describe how hurricanes like Irma and Melissa are generally known as “deep-anticipatory perturbations.” Combine the fear of this catastrophe reoccurring with the psychological isolation related to such an experience, and it is evident that the resulting storm is stressful. This, they explain, makes people more vulnerable to long-term emotional distress.
A hidden tool
Aid is commonly sent to rebuild communities, fix infrastructure and establish telecommunications connections. But the mental health tool is just not so solid. Perhaps that’s the reason it is commonly ignored.
As recently as 2022, the United Nations Climate Authority, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highlighted that climate change poses serious risks to mental well-being. And we should not all equally affected.
“Certain people and communities are exposed to rapidly increasing mental health outcomes due to their proximity to risk, their dependence on livelihoods and cultural environments, and their social status,” write three Canadian researchers, who study the mental health implications of climate change.
This includes farming communities which are already experiencing drought and folks living in areas most vulnerable to flooding or wildfires.
Bullseye effect?
The collective shock is currently being felt all of the strategy to the Caribbean and beyond.
Jonathan S. Comer and Anthony Steven Dick, psychologists at Florida International University within the US, said more studies now show that the negative mental health effects of disasters extend far beyond the immediate disaster area.
This goes against the once-dominant theory of disaster mental health, sometimes called the “bullseye model”, which proposed that the negative mental health effects of a disaster were directly related to how close an individual was to the epicenter of the event.
When Hurricane Irma struck in 2017, they used a national long-term research project that was already underway to check how 11,800 children were coping each before and after the disaster.
“Higher media exposure was associated with higher reporting of later traumatic stress symptoms—and this link was as strong among San Diego youth as it was among Florida youth,” write Comer and Dick, who suggest limiting exposure to social media because “expansion of such content provides additional actionable information.”
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Narrative and neurons
According to academic researchers at Canada's University of Regina, climate trauma may result from “learning about or experiencing climate change crises,” suggesting that young individuals are particularly vulnerable. Focusing on responding to problems can lead people to examine a greater future quite than teaching doomsday clock narratives: “It's more helpful to share concrete examples of community-led climate mitigation, adaptation and financing initiatives,” he writes.
The trauma of experiencing extreme weather can change the way in which our brains work. In 2023, Jyoti Mishra, associate professor of psychology on the University of California, San Diego, studied how climate change-related trauma affected the memory, attention, and talents of people that survived the 2018 wildfires, which devastated the town of Paradise, California.
“People who were exposed to wildfires had greater frontal lobe activity when dealing with distractions,” she writes. The frontal lobe is the middle of the brain for higher level functions and frontal brain activity could be a marker for cognitive effort. Individuals with burnout can have more difficulty processing and compensating for distractions while pursuing further efforts.
Rebuilding resilience
Globally, multiple billion people already live with a mental health condition, in keeping with the World Health Organization World Health Organization. Climate disasters will “intensify”, in keeping with UN University researchers who explain that “mental health support systems must be a fully integrated part of any plan to adapt to climate change and respond to disasters”.
Generally, mental health is taken into account in relation to emergency response and disaster management but its support must transcend this, to the long run. This is because psychological well-being enables people to deal with adversity and construct constructive relationships.
Acting as a part of a collective, quite than alone, helps people gain a way of agency and solidarity while bringing about positive change. The researchers also explain that, just like the UN COP30 climate summit starting next week in Brazil, global climate summits also needs to include funding to support mental health. This will “help transition from a state of fear and anxiety for many to hope for building more resilient societies, leaving no one behind and empowering future generations to take climate action”.
As psychologist Professor Mishra explains: “Resilient mental health is what allows us to recover from traumatic experiences. The way humans experience and mentally cope with climate catastrophe sets the stage for our future lives.”
