Hotter Temperatures may Affect Mental Well-being

Hotter temperatures affect mental well-being as it raises depression and suicide rates, finds a new study.

Rising temperatures could raise suicides and the use of depressive language on social media, reveals a new study. The findings of the study are published in the journal Nature Climate Change.//

The effects of climate change could be as devastating as the influence of economic recessions when it comes to increasing suicide rates.

Overview Suicide
Suicide is an act of ending one's own life and it usually results from emotional isolations and inability to adjust and cope with one's environment.

‘Projected temperature rise can affect mental well-being and boost depression, suicide rates. ’

Projected temperature rise through 2050 could lead to an additional 21,000 suicides in the US and Mexico, the findings showed.

"Surprisingly, these effects differ very little based on how rich populations are or if they are used to warm weather," said lead researcher Marshall Burke, Assistant Professor at Stanford University.

Researchers have recognized for centuries that suicides tend to peak during warmer months. But, many factors beyond temperature also vary seasonally - such as unemployment rates or the amount of daylight - and up to this point, it has been difficult to disentangle the role of temperature from other risk factors.

Depression - Symptom Evaluation
Depression occurs due to alterations in the levels of neurotransmitters in the brain.

To tease out the role of temperature from other factors, the researchers compared historical temperature and suicide data across thousands of US counties and Mexican municipalities over several decades.

The team also analyzed the language in over half a billion Twitter updates or tweets to determine further whether hotter temperatures affect mental well-being.

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They analyzed, for example, whether tweets contain language such as "lonely," "trapped," or "suicidal" more often during hot spells.

The researchers found strong evidence linking warmer temperature with higher suicide rates.

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To understand how future climate change might affect suicide rates, the team used projections from global climate models.

Temperature rise by 2050 could increase suicide rates by 1.4 percent in the US and 2.3 percent in Mexico.

"Hotter temperatures are clearly not the only, nor the most important, risk factor for suicide," Burke emphasized.

"But our findings suggest that warming can have a surprisingly large impact on suicide risk, and this matters for both our understanding of mental health as well as for what we should expect as temperatures continue to warm," Burke added.

Source-IANS