It is a subject which, on this side of the Atlantic, collects little data, but which is likely to require urgent attention in the years to come: the impact of climatic disasters on our mental health. In the United States, more and more studies are interested in the effect that fires, hurricanes and repeated floods cause on the brain. Eco-anxiety – that is to say anxiety linked to global warming – is not the only psychological marker of the crisis. Post-traumatic stress disorder, more associated by the general public with soldiers or severely injured people, is increasing in the population as extreme events increase.
Post-traumatic stress disorder occurs after traumatic events. Can be very disabling, they cause moral suffering, and sometimes physical complications. The life of the affected person is altered. “The symptoms are multiple, explains psychiatrist Guillaume Fond, teacher and researcher at the University Hospitals of Marseille. They include sleep disorders, but also withdrawal. The person’s emotions will fluctuate and they can become very irritable. Finally , it is also possible that she enters a depression characterized with suicidal ideation”.
These different symptoms can be triggered in the weeks, months or even years after the events. “In these cases, we often speak of hypervigilance: the person is always very alert, on the alert, inhabited by a fear that does not leave him”, adds Wissam El Hage, professor of adult psychiatry and specialist in post-traumatic stress.
A lot of veterans
Reported in soldiers since ancient times, the concept of post-traumatic disorder was only clinically identified in the 1980s, after the damage caused by the Vietnam War among American veterans. It is now recognized that this condition can also affect the general population – its prevalence would be 5 to 12% among Americans -, but would be largely underestimated. In the case of climatic disasters, in this case, it was not until the mid-2000s that scientists linked them to possible symptoms of mental disorders.
It all started with Hurricane Katrina, one of the six strongest on record, which devastated the coasts of Louisana and New Orleans in August 2005. Over 1,800 people were killed during the storm. But beyond this terrible human toll, Katrina had a lasting impact on the brains of Americans who experienced it. One after these events, Dr. Jeffrey Rouse, coroner of New Orleans, observed in the New York Times that the number of suicides had jumped from 9 per 100,000 inhabitants before the hurricane to 26 per 100,000 during the last four months of 2005.
Thirteen years later, a study in the American scientific journal PNAS, conducted by Doctor Nick Obradovich, demonstrated that Katrina had led to a 4% increase in mental disorders in affected populations. After the hurricane, “suicides and suicidal ideation more than doubled, one in six people met the criteria for the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress”, noted in March 2017 the report “Mental health and climate change” of the American Psychological Association. The phenomenon even has a name in the United States: the “Katrina brain” – “the Katrina brain”, in French.
The aftermath of Hurricane Irma
Since then, studies have multiplied in the United States. In 2021, a publication from the University of California San Diego demonstrated that survivors of the 2018 Camp Fire — which ravaged more than 55,000 acres and claimed 63 lives in California — had levels of post-stress stress. trauma similar to those found in veterans. These residents also had very high levels of anxiety and depression. “The amount of post-traumatic stress that we noticed in the individuals observed was very significant, explained to the washington post Jioti Mishra, lead author of the study and a professor in the department of psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine. Usually we found these levels in veterans, but now we see them in communities where people are exposed to fires. It shows just how much of a stressor climate change has become for mental health.”
Guillaume Fond has been warning about the phenomenon for several years. In 2019, in an editorial signed with four other psychiatrists and doctors specializing in public health (Marc Masson, Christophe Lançon, Pascal Aquier and Laurent Boyer) published in the reference journal in psychiatry Brain, he drew attention to the links between psychiatry and global warming. Increasingly recognized in the United States, the phenomenon is not yet widely studied in France. A situation that is all the more worrying since, on French territory too, extreme weather events are likely to occur with greater regularity than before… and to have a significant psychological impact. Thus, after passing theHurricane Irma in September 2018 on the island of Saint-Martin, 47% of people taking part in medico-psychological consultations experienced anxiety disorders, 40% stress and 27% sleep disorders. Nearly a third of these people had then started a psychological follow-up.
The need to create a register
This situation has everything not to be an isolated event in the future. Thus, according to the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), each additional degree of warming leads to a 7% increase in precipitation from thunderstorms and storms. “However, the more a person is confronted with a type of repeated traumatic event, the more likely they are to develop symptoms of post-traumatic syndrome”, remarks Antoine Pelissolo, head of the psychiatry department at the Henri-Mondor hospital in Creteil (Val-de-Marne).
But the management of post-traumatic stress is complex. “The disorders are often intense and resistant to treatment, notes Antoine Pelissolo. But early support can help avoid symptoms. In these cases, the most effective therapy is often EMDR”. This technique, also called cognitive-behavioral therapy, involves the affected person remembering the traumatic event experienced by answering the practitioner’s questions. “Drug treatments are also a possible option, but it should only be a last resort, in order to avoid excessive consumption, then addiction”, continues the specialist. Another risk incurred, however, is to be sought further upstream. “Many people affected by post-traumatic stress, especially when it is linked to a climatic disaster, are not even detected, adds the psychiatrist. This trend is all the more marked in children, who often have more difficult to verbalize their ill-being”.
To improve their care, more and more specialists are thinking about setting up a register of people subjected to intense climatic events. “This would allow us to list people and have a real follow-up, like what could have been done following the attacks in Paris”, advances Wissam El Hage. Better inventory, to better treat.