Mar 28, 2022
Salmon Arm had been blanketed in wildfire smoke for days. A record heat dome had killed nearly 600 people across the province only weeks earlier.
When the town of Lytton, B.C., set a Canadian temperature record of 49.6 C — a day later burning to the ground — the evacuees added to the steady stream of patients at the Shuswap Lake General Hospital.
Emergency room doctor Lori Adamson remembers stretchers lined up in the hallway. The number of patients suffering heat illness and smoke inhalation meant her unit was running out of available beds and nurses.
Then came the suicides.
“A lot of the youth that I was seeing were attempting to commit suicide because of climate distress,” she told Glacier Media.
“They're fearing that they'll never outlive the climate disasters and global warming… they overtly expressed that.”
Adamson says at least three young patients she saw tried to end their life through a drug overdose because they feared climate change. Some were transferred to hospitals that could provide higher levels of care.
The doctor does not know how or if all the patients survived.
There is emerging evidence that government inaction on climate change is impacting young people's health in severe ways. Last September, a global survey of 10,000 young people across 10 countries found nearly half of those between 16 and 25 reported psychological distress over climate change.
In some of the most telling signs, 58 per cent of respondents said governments were betraying future generations; 75 per cent said “the future was frightening.”
In recent years, suicide rates in British Columbia have steadily declined from a peak in 2014. But the provincial numbers hide some important regional differences. As of 2018, B.C.’s Interior Health Authority recorded the highest rate of suicide deaths, with the Northern Health Authority following close behind.
How the fallout from climate change will affect those numbers is less clear. Experts are just starting to probe the links between climate change and mental health. After a year in which a series of extreme weather events devastated British Columbia, that work has already uncovered some important trends.
One study released in January 2022 found the heat dome that scorched British Columbia in late June led to a 13 per cent average rise in anxiety over the effects of climate change. The study did not, however, probe the effects of climate change on suicide rates.
Study co-author Kiffer Card said he is not surprised climate anxiety is pushing people toward taking their own life.
“One of the main features of suicide is a sense of hopelessness,” said the epidemiologist, who studies the effects of climate change on mental health at Simon Fraser University. “Certainly, weather and worries about the future can give that extra push to end your life.”
Suicidal thoughts are rarely the result of one factor. Card says the combined effects of the ongoing opioid crisis or a lack of cognitive capacity and controls in some people are among a long list of factors that can trigger a mental health crisis.
Some people look at the world around them and tell themselves, “Climate change is here. It’s burning down my neighbourhood. Where is my future?” said Card.
“It provokes a spiral.”
To date, there has been little research looking at how climate change is going to impact suicide rates in Canada. But that’s changing.
“We know that eco-anxiety is a real thing — that is absolutely diagnosable — and that depression is also linked to people's feelings of helplessness,” said Tim Takaro, a medical doctor and scientist studying the health impacts of climate change.
“What I don't know is how many people with climate-related depression are going to take their lives.”
A report Takaro co-authored earlier this year looking at the health impacts of climate change in Canada found that in 15 previous studies, suicides rates went up with high ambient temperatures.
Studies in other jurisdictions measuring the effects of a warming world on suicide rates paint a grim picture.
In 2020, a group of researchers — including University of British Columbia environmental economics researcher Patrick Baylis — examined the link between suicide rates and temperature data across the U.S. and Mexico. The long-term historical data suggested that for every one degree Celsius increase in monthly average temperature, suicide rates climbed 0.7 per cent in U.S. counties and 2.1 per cent in Mexican municipalities.
By 2050, the researchers found global temperature rise could lead to between 9,000 and 40,000 additional suicides between the two countries. That’s a change in suicide rates comparable to what’s estimated during an economic recession, suicide prevention programs or gun restriction laws, concluded the study.
And while it’s not clear how their findings apply to a more northerly jurisdiction like Canada, the study found “the effect is similar in hotter versus cooler regions and has not diminished over time.”
“Historical adaption,” the data suggests, is “limited.”
“It’s very chilling,” said Takaro of the results. “I don’t think it’s appreciably different from the U.S., only that it’s happening a little faster here.”
According to data from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global heating is expected to accelerate two to three times faster in Canada than the global average.
It's not just temperature that can impact mental health. Last month, those same IPCC scientists found temperature rise is contributing to a growing global wildfire crisis.
For many living in B.C., that crisis is already here.
In 2017, Raymond Ford and his wife returned from a 17-year stint living in the United States. The plan was to keep it simple — buy a chunk of land near 100 Mile House and live a quiet life.
Unfortunately for the couple, they came home the same year the BC Wildfire Service describes as “one of the worst wildfire seasons in British Columbia’s history.”
Ford and his wife temporarily moved into a trailer parked on a ranch outside of town. Fire tore through the region, burning huge swaths of forest and driving people from their homes.
The couple were among 65,000 people evacuated that year.
“At one point, we were surrounded by four fires,” said Ford.
Ford has Asperger syndrome, a condition on the autism spectrum often associated with the capacity for extreme focus on a single task. He says it’s driven him to become a self-taught scientist. He has spent years selling and servicing mass spectrometers, complicated devices that can be used to test everything from the purity of cannabis and prescribed drugs to carbon dating an archeological find.
But the neurodevelopmental disorder also makes it hard for Ford to regulate his emotions, a state made even more fragile after his father passed away a week before the fires.
Following 21 days of evacuation, Ford says the experience left him afraid to go near a campfire, and soon, he says he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“I’ll never forget seeing that fire coming at me,” he said. “So much destruction.”
“It just goes to show you’re not in control of your life sometimes when something like this happens.”
That is until he found a way to regain control. Since the 2017 fire season, Ford has immersed himself in the science of climate change, linking up with the Climate Emergency Forum, an advocacy group that has participated in the last two United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) climate change conferences. ?
.............................................................................
Salmon Arm had been blanketed in wildfire smoke for days. A record heat dome had killed nearly 600 people across the province only weeks earlier.
When the town of Lytton, B.C., set a Canadian temperature record of 49.6 C — a day later burning to the ground — the evacuees added to the steady stream of patients at the Shuswap Lake General Hospital.
Emergency room doctor Lori Adamson remembers stretchers lined up in the hallway. The number of patients suffering heat illness and smoke inhalation meant her unit was running out of available beds and nurses.
Then came the suicides.
“A lot of the youth that I was seeing were attempting to commit suicide because of climate distress,” she told Glacier Media.
“They're fearing that they'll never outlive the climate disasters and global warming… they overtly expressed that.”
Adamson says at least three young patients she saw tried to end their life through a drug overdose because they feared climate change. Some were transferred to hospitals that could provide higher levels of care.
The doctor does not know how or if all the patients survived.
There is emerging evidence that government inaction on climate change is impacting young people's health in severe ways. Last September, a global survey of 10,000 young people across 10 countries found nearly half of those between 16 and 25 reported psychological distress over climate change.
In some of the most telling signs, 58 per cent of respondents said governments were betraying future generations; 75 per cent said “the future was frightening.”
In recent years, suicide rates in British Columbia have steadily declined from a peak in 2014. But the provincial numbers hide some important regional differences. As of 2018, B.C.’s Interior Health Authority recorded the highest rate of suicide deaths, with the Northern Health Authority following close behind.
How the fallout from climate change will affect those numbers is less clear. Experts are just starting to probe the links between climate change and mental health. After a year in which a series of extreme weather events devastated British Columbia, that work has already uncovered some important trends.
One study released in January 2022 found the heat dome that scorched British Columbia in late June led to a 13 per cent average rise in anxiety over the effects of climate change. The study did not, however, probe the effects of climate change on suicide rates.
Study co-author Kiffer Card said he is not surprised climate anxiety is pushing people toward taking their own life.
“One of the main features of suicide is a sense of hopelessness,” said the epidemiologist, who studies the effects of climate change on mental health at Simon Fraser University. “Certainly, weather and worries about the future can give that extra push to end your life.”
Suicidal thoughts are rarely the result of one factor. Card says the combined effects of the ongoing opioid crisis or a lack of cognitive capacity and controls in some people are among a long list of factors that can trigger a mental health crisis.
Some people look at the world around them and tell themselves, “Climate change is here. It’s burning down my neighbourhood. Where is my future?” said Card.
“It provokes a spiral.”
To date, there has been little research looking at how climate change is going to impact suicide rates in Canada. But that’s changing.
“We know that eco-anxiety is a real thing — that is absolutely diagnosable — and that depression is also linked to people's feelings of helplessness,” said Tim Takaro, a medical doctor and scientist studying the health impacts of climate change.
“What I don't know is how many people with climate-related depression are going to take their lives.”
A report Takaro co-authored earlier this year looking at the health impacts of climate change in Canada found that in 15 previous studies, suicides rates went up with high ambient temperatures.
Studies in other jurisdictions measuring the effects of a warming world on suicide rates paint a grim picture.
In 2020, a group of researchers — including University of British Columbia environmental economics researcher Patrick Baylis — examined the link between suicide rates and temperature data across the U.S. and Mexico. The long-term historical data suggested that for every one degree Celsius increase in monthly average temperature, suicide rates climbed 0.7 per cent in U.S. counties and 2.1 per cent in Mexican municipalities.
By 2050, the researchers found global temperature rise could lead to between 9,000 and 40,000 additional suicides between the two countries. That’s a change in suicide rates comparable to what’s estimated during an economic recession, suicide prevention programs or gun restriction laws, concluded the study.
And while it’s not clear how their findings apply to a more northerly jurisdiction like Canada, the study found “the effect is similar in hotter versus cooler regions and has not diminished over time.”
“Historical adaption,” the data suggests, is “limited.”
“It’s very chilling,” said Takaro of the results. “I don’t think it’s appreciably different from the U.S., only that it’s happening a little faster here.”
According to data from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global heating is expected to accelerate two to three times faster in Canada than the global average.
It's not just temperature that can impact mental health. Last month, those same IPCC scientists found temperature rise is contributing to a growing global wildfire crisis.
For many living in B.C., that crisis is already here.
In 2017, Raymond Ford and his wife returned from a 17-year stint living in the United States. The plan was to keep it simple — buy a chunk of land near 100 Mile House and live a quiet life.
Unfortunately for the couple, they came home the same year the BC Wildfire Service describes as “one of the worst wildfire seasons in British Columbia’s history.”
Ford and his wife temporarily moved into a trailer parked on a ranch outside of town. Fire tore through the region, burning huge swaths of forest and driving people from their homes.
The couple were among 65,000 people evacuated that year.
“At one point, we were surrounded by four fires,” said Ford.
Ford has Asperger syndrome, a condition on the autism spectrum often associated with the capacity for extreme focus on a single task. He says it’s driven him to become a self-taught scientist. He has spent years selling and servicing mass spectrometers, complicated devices that can be used to test everything from the purity of cannabis and prescribed drugs to carbon dating an archeological find.
But the neurodevelopmental disorder also makes it hard for Ford to regulate his emotions, a state made even more fragile after his father passed away a week before the fires.
Following 21 days of evacuation, Ford says the experience left him afraid to go near a campfire, and soon, he says he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“I’ll never forget seeing that fire coming at me,” he said. “So much destruction.”
“It just goes to show you’re not in control of your life sometimes when something like this happens.”
That is until he found a way to regain control. Since the 2017 fire season, Ford has immersed himself in the science of climate change, linking up with the Climate Emergency Forum, an advocacy group that has participated in the last two United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) climate change conferences. ?
.............................................................................
In B.C., ER doctor says patients are attempting suicide over climate anxiety - BC News
Salmon Arm had been blanketed in wildfire smoke for days. A record heat dome had killed nearly 600 people across the province only weeks earlier.
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Richard Corey want home last night,
