How Climate Change is Affecting Mental Health

While it appears to be obvious that climate change can impact physical health, most people tend to ignore the impacts climate change can have on mental health.

By creating lots of natural disasters, climate change make the survivors of these natural disasters experience stress, anxiety, and fear. People are threatened of the increased frequency and magnitude of such disasters and may have experienced the loss of property, home, and even beloved family members in such disasters, leading to low mental health status.

Also, climate change can harm people’s mental health by causing forced migration or the degradation of living conditions. For example, in Bangladesh, many people are forced to move out of their original homes – which have been flooded 3 times or so – and move to Dhaka, where families live in crowded slums with bad sanitation, flooded sewage systems, insufficient electricity supply, and limited space. Such bad living conditions do harm the mental health status of people, but the majority of them cannot afford a trip back to home or has already lost their home due to natural disasters.

Thus, climate change can also impact the mental health of people on top of influencing their physical health.