Heat Waves Can Be Bad For Your (Mental) Health
Temperature rises make people more impulsive and unhappy and increase the risk of suicide, a study shows.
Not everyone enjoys a heat wave.
Photographer: Oli Scarff/Getty Images EuropeIt’s sunny and hot, colleagues are turning up at work in shorts, restaurants’ summer verandas are teeming with customers. That sounds great. And yet for some people, those conditions trigger depression and even suicidal thoughts.
A recent paper by Stanford University’s Marshall Burke and collaborators estimates that a 1 degree Celsius increase in average monthly temperature produces a 0.68 percent increase in the monthly suicide rate in the U.S. and a 2.1 percent increase in Mexico. Burke also found that each additional degree of average temperature boosts the likelihood of depressive language in tweets by 0.79 percent. This means heat waves like the current one in the U.S., with temperatures 10 degrees or more above average, result in dozens of additional suicides and in emotional lows for hundreds of thousands of people — one reason why climate change is dangerous even to people living in countries that aren’t threatened by flooding and, to a superficial eye, would only benefit from a slightly warmer climate.