Study predicts that climate change may lead to more suicides

If the fears surrounding climate change weren't harrowing enough already, researchers now are saying climate change's accompanying hotter temperatures could lead to a rise in suicide rates as well.

The study by Stanford University and UC Berkeley researchers — published last week in the journal Nature Climate Change — concluded that projected temperature increases over the next few decades could lead to an additional 21,000 suicides in the United States and Mexico by 2050, Berkeley News said.

'Heat profoundly affects the human mind'

“We’ve been studying the effects of warming on conflict and violence for years, finding that people fight more when it’s hot. Now we see that in addition to hurting others, some individuals hurt themselves," Solomon Hsiang, study co-author and an associate professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy, told Berkeley News. "It appears that heat profoundly affects the human mind and how we decide to inflict harm.”

Many factors aside from temperature also vary as seasons change, the outlet said, such as "unemployment rates or the amount of daylight" — but it's been hard to disentangle the role of temperature and other risk factors until now.

More from Berkeley News:

The researchers compared historical temperature and suicide data across thousands of U.S. counties and Mexican municipalities over several decades, and also analyzed the language used in over half a billion Twitter updates – tweets – to determine whether hotter temperatures impact mental well-being. They looked, for example, at whether people’s tweets expressed feeling ‘lonely,’ ‘trapped,’ or ‘suicidal’ more often during hot spells.

'The effects in Texas are some of the highest in the country'

“We found very strong evidence that abnormally hot weather increases both suicide rates and the use of depressive language on social media,” lead author Marshall Burke — an assistant professor of Earth system science in the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences at Stanford who received his Ph.D. from Berkeley — told the News. “Surprisingly, these effects differ very little based on how rich populations are, or if they are used to warm weather. For example, the effects in Texas are some of the highest in the country.”

The researchers also told the outlet the possible increase in U.S. and Mexican suicide rates by 2050 due to higher temperatures — 1.4 percent and 2.3 percent, respectively — are comparable to the effects of a recession.

“When talking about climate change, it’s often easy to think in abstractions," Burke told the News. "But the thousands of additional suicides that are likely to occur as a result of unmitigated climate change are not just a number, they represent tragic losses for families across the country.”

(H/T: Campus Reform)