Climate change may potentially lead to a surge in suicide rates due to various factors such as mental health issues triggered by environmental stressors, economic hardships, and social unrest.
Let's dive into some mind-boggling shit. Global warming ain't just messing with the environment, it's messing with our fucking heads too. According to some smart fucks, it could be responsible for an increase in suicides in the USA and Mexico.
Listen up, 'cause suicide is a motherfucker - it's one of the leading causes of death worldwide. In the freakin' USA, there are an average of 123 suicides per day. That's a lot of lives lost due to some motherfucker unable to cope with the weight of their shit.
Now, in 2016, there were as many suicides as there were homicides. That's scary as fuck, right? Suicide is still a complicated and deeply personal issue, but research into the factors involved is fucking urgent.
Suicide and the fucking heat
Over the years, some researchers have been trying to figure out if global warming is linked to suicide rates. Some say that suicide rates peak during the warmer months, like late spring and early summer. But not all studies agree on this, and it's been a real pain in the ass to figure out what's really going on.
Obviously, it gets hotter during the summer, but is the heat itself the issue? Maybe there are other seasonal factors to consider, like unemployment, which might increase during the summer months.
To untangle the fucking mess, a team led by Marshall Burke from Stanford University in California jumped into the data. They matched suicide rates to temperature records from thousands of U.S. counties and Mexican municipalities over several decades. They also searched through around 600 million tweets looking for messages that contained words like "suicidal," "trapped," and "lonely."
And guess the fuck what? They found that hotter weather does seem to increase the suicide rate and the use of depressive language on Twitter.
According to Burke, "It's surprising, but these effects don't change much based on how rich a population is or if they're used to warm weather." In Texas, suicide rates are high, and they've remained stable, despite the steady increase in air conditioning.
Climate change and suicides
For the next step in their research, the scientists wanted to understand how climate change might impact suicide rates in the USA and Mexico. They took estimated temperature changes from global climate models and found that a temperature rise by 2050 could increase suicide rates by 1.4 percent in the USA and 2.3 percent in Mexico. If climate change continues unchecked, it could result in a combined 9,000-40,000 additional suicides in both countries by 2050.
Study co-author Solomon Hsiang from the University of California, Berkeley says, "We've been studying the effects of warming on conflict and violence for years, finding that people fight more when it's hot. Now we see that in addition to hurting others, some individuals hurt themselves."
"It appears that heat profoundly affects the human mind and how we decide to inflict harm."
The authors are quick to point out that climate change isn't directly causing an increase in suicides, but an increase in temperature may increase the risk that an individual will decide to take their own life.
"Hotter temperatures are clearly not the only, nor the most important, risk factor for suicide," says Burke. "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 rise."
This study is fucking eye-opening and disturbing as hell. As the authors explain, it's crucial that we figure out why suicide rates increase during warmer weather and implement policies to mitigate future temperature rises.
In light of the connection between global warming and mental health, research into the relationship between suicide rates and temperature has been carried out. Interestingly, a study led by Marshall Burke from Stanford University found that hotter weather seems to increase suicide rates and the use of depressive language on Twitter. If climate change continues unchecked, it could account for an additional 9,000-40,000 suicides in the USA and Mexico by 2050, highlighting the urgent need for climate change prevention and mental health-and-wellness support, particularly in the context of environmental-science and health-and-wellness policies.
