Skip to content

Healthy Natural US

Menu
  • Newsletter
Menu

The hidden mental health cost of climate distress

Posted on August 4, 2025


Stanford University VIA MEDICAL XPRESS – A new Stanford-led study sheds light on “an emerging psychological health crisis” that disproportionately affects girls.

Published July 30 in The Lancet Planetary Health, the study is among the first to quantify how repeated climate stressors impact the psychological well-being and future outlook of adolescents in low-resource settings.

Researchers from Stanford’s schools of Medicine, Law, and Sustainability partnered with health experts in Bangladesh to survey more than 1,000 teenagers and conduct focus groups across two regions with starkly different flood exposure.

“What we found really lifts the voices of frontline adolescents—a group whose perspectives and health outcomes are so rarely investigated and communicated,” said lead author Liza Goldberg, an incoming Earth system science Ph.D. student in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

Teens in flood-prone Barisal, Bangladesh, were nearly twice as likely to show signs of anxiety and more than three times as likely to experience depressive symptoms compared to peers in relatively more flood-safe Dhaka, the country’s capital city.

…article continued below

– Advertisement –

Girls were nearly twice as likely to show signs of anxiety, often driven by worry over potential household stress and domestic violence that might result from natural disasters.

“Fears around climate change may be a central contributor to everyday well-being,” said Goldberg, a 2024 graduate of Stanford’s Earth Systems Program. “We were shocked by the rates of climate distress we observed, particularly the feeling that environmental changes are derailing young people’s sense of purpose and possibility.”

The study’s qualitative findings paint a vivid picture of how extreme weather affects young people’s mental state and life decisions. In Barisal, adolescents described how financial strain from frequent flooding has forced families to abandon dreams of higher education and stable work, replacing them with fatalism, household conflict, early marriage, and deep emotional strain.

“The perspectives of these adolescents, especially the girls, who live in some of the world’s most climate-affected communities demonstrate the human price of climate change, and underscore the importance of addressing it,” said study co-author Stephen Luby, the Lucy Becker Professor of Medicine in the Stanford School of Medicine.

Across the study population, symptoms of anxiety were strongly linked to what researchers call “temporal discounting”—a tendency to avoid long-term planning in favor of short-term decisions.

…article continued below

– Advertisement –

When families are focused only on getting through the day, they may make minor annual adjustments, like raising a home by a few inches, instead of making more significant investments—like moving away from a river or using flood-resistant building materials—that would ensure their long-term safety and resilience.

“This study marks a critical turning point in recognizing the mental health crisis silently unfolding among climate-vulnerable adolescents,” said study co-author Farjana Jahan, an associate scientist at the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh.

“It brings evidence to what communities have long felt but could not quantify—that the climate crisis is also a psychological one.”

The researchers call for investment in community-driven mental health interventions—particularly those tailored to adolescents and informed by their lived experience, as well as gender-sensitive climate resilience interventions, such as programs that protect girls’ educational and economic opportunities during and after climate disasters.

“This is about more than mental health,” said study co-author Gabrielle Wong-Parodi, an associate professor of Earth system science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. “Our findings suggest that cognitive overload and despair are making it harder for vulnerable communities to adapt to climate change. If young people can’t plan for their future, the entire community’s resilience is at risk.”

 



Source link

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

  • Once a Death Sentence, This Heart Condition Is Finally Treatable
  • Air quality alerts in place for 10 states due to Canadian wildfires
  • Work Requirements and Red Tape Ahead for Millions on Medicaid
  • Woman dies in French botulism outbreak
  • The hidden mental health cost of climate distress

Recent Comments

No comments to show.

Archives

  • August 2025
  • July 2025
  • June 2025
  • May 2025
  • April 2025
  • March 2025
  • February 2025
  • January 2025
  • December 2024
  • November 2024
  • October 2024
  • September 2024
  • August 2024
  • July 2024
  • June 2024
  • May 2024
  • April 2024
  • March 2024
  • February 2024
  • January 2024
  • December 2023
  • November 2023
  • October 2023
  • September 2023
  • August 2023

Categories

  • Health
©2025 Healthy Natural US | Design: Newspaperly WordPress Theme