September is Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. Globally, over 720,000 people die by suicide each year, and suicide is the third leading cause of death in young people.
The Commonwealth Fund 2023 International Health Policy Survey found the U.S. has the highest suicide rate compared to nine other high-income countries, and has been trending up. There is increasing evidence of relationships between suicidality and climate change. Climate-driven suicides must not be ignored if we are to protect those most at risk in our communities.
How climate change impacts mental health
The climate crisis can be linked to suicide through direct and indirect impacts on health and well-being. Direct effects of burning fossil fuels, such as air pollution and higher temperatures, are linked to increasing suicide rates. Indirectly, climate-related suicides may increase when people experience extreme weather such as drought or crop-damaging heat.
In its extreme, climate change permanently displaces people, and research has shown refugees have higher rates of suicidality.
Beyond these impacts, climate change-suicide relationships are complex, interrelated, and exacerbated by our public policies. We may see unintentional consequences of the current administration’s policies on socioeconomic and environmental stress within communities facing high rates of suicide.
Consider farmers who, as U.S. Senator (R) Tommy Tuberville recently highlighted, are three and a half times more likely to commit suicide than the general population. The short- and longer-term impacts of current policies (including agricultural tariffs increasing costs, the deportation of undocumented farmworkers causing crops to go unharvested, and backtracking on climate policies) may strain U.S. farmers even more. This stress will be layered on top of what a recent study estimates will be significant declines in agriculture yields by 2050.
Addressing a deeply concerning trend
As the planet warms, there will likely be more climate-driven suicides. These reflect human hardship, but they are preventable.
It is critical that suicide prevention resources are made available. There also needs to be strong investment in mental health and well-being in both high-income and low- and middle-income countries. And it is essential that public mental health research addresses research gaps on how climate change-suicide relationships affect vulnerable populations and environmental justice groups.
We must simultaneously support all efforts to move away from our dependence on fossil fuel use, the driver of climate change, and support the transformative shift to clean energy.
At CPA and many other climate-concerned groups, we find hope in action and advocate for sound mental health policies that protect people in our communities and beyond.
A version of this blog also appeared in CPA’s September newsletter.
Caroline Dumont, MD, MPH is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Yale’s Department of Psychiatry. Among many projects, her current work focuses on developing interventions to address health disparities related to climate change and mental health. Working on the Community Support Program and Assertive Community Treatment teams at the Connecticut the Mental Health Center, where she often sees people in their homes and communities, inspires her research to support people with serious mental illness during extreme heat events. Her work on the relationships between suicide and climate change has been published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease and in a highly-accessible and concise article for Ecopsychepedia. She is a reviewer for the Journal of Climate Change and Health, a global scientific medical journal.