Via The Guardian: After the wildfire: treating the mental health crisis triggered by climate change. Excerpt:
The nightmares kept coming and David Leal knew he was in trouble. A navy veteran with a can-do attitude and a solidly middle-class IT job at a hospital in Santa Rosa, California, he didn’t think of himself as mentally vulnerable. But when the Tubbs fire snatched his house off the face of the earth in the early morning hours of 9 October 2017, it hit him hard.
“Long story short, I went through a lot of PTSD,” Leal says, as we tour his nearly rebuilt home in Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park neighborhood. Wildfires are not uncommon in the mountains outside of this northern California town, but residents can’t remember one like this: the fire jumped six lanes of Highway 101, into the city, and licked up about 1,300 of the suburb’s 2,000 homes as if they’d just evaporated. Leal thought, I live in the city; it’s not supposed to burn
“Retiring from the navy, I had a lot of junk in my head,” he adds. After the fire, it all came up. “I was having nightmares of occurrences that I went through in the military – but it was going even further back. My brain was just unloading. Every traumatic issue I ever had in my life was coming back to me. There were things that I went through as a little boy that I was waking up going, ‘Whoa. Where did that come from?’”
The climate crisis is manifesting as ever-bigger wildfires, hurricanes, floods and heat waves; and cities are just starting to grapple with the mental impact of the emergency. A climate task force of the American Psychological Association, citing scores of studies over the last decades, reports that survivors of these human-enhanced disasters are experiencing dramatic increases in depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety disorders, suicide and suicidal thoughts, violent behavior and increased use of drugs and alcohol. A Rand study found that one-third of the adult survivors of California wildfires in 2003 suffered depression and one-quarter suffered PTSD.
Those with a history of mental or behavioral issues are particularly at risk. But many others are taken by surprise when they suddenly realize they can’t sleep or work, or can’t shake their sadness.
“It’s a normal human response to a terrible thing,” said Adrienne Heinz, a researcher at the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Center for PTSD who lives in Sonoma.
The mental health effects of climate change have been known for quite some time now: a 1991 meta-study found that as many as 40% of those directly impacted by climate-enhanced superstorms and fires suffer acute negative mental health effects, some of which become chronic. Puerto Rico, for example, has seen an epidemic of suicide, PTSD and depression after hurricanes Irma and Maria. After Hurricane Katrina, some people referred to the sense of generalized anxiety and depression common to survivors as “Katrina brain”.
