The range of adverse mental health effects resulting from climate change include triggering or exacerbating anxiety, depression, grief, and suicide. Natural phenomena from heatwaves and droughts to floods and fires that are fueled by climate change cause trauma, distress, and other mental health conditions. So can chronic, slow-onset effects of global warming, such as water and food insecurity, community breakdown, and conflict. Members of marginalized groups, especially Indigenous peoples, feel these effects in unique and especially acute ways. Meanwhile, research documenting varied and far-reaching mental health harms caused by climate change continues to mount.

Climate change’s adverse mental health effects are taking a disproportionate toll on the world’s nearly 1 billion people with pre-existing mental health conditions, or psychosocial disabilities. Rising temperatures, for example, carry pronounced risks for persons with psychosocial disabilities who rely on medications that affect the body’s response to heat. Other persons with psychosocial disabilities have difficulty accessing the services they need to cope with the mental health effects of climate change. This is especially true for people with psychosocial disabilities living in low- and middle-income countries, where few people (only 1 in 27 according to one survey) can access the mental health services they need. While researchers work to develop global mental-health indicators that can be linked to weather and climate data, governmental and intergovernmental agencies are racing to address this critical and widening gap.

On May 8, from 12:15 to 1:30 p.m. U.S. Eastern, the Harvard Law School Project on Disability (HPOD), together with the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, and the GlobalMentalHealth@Harvard Initiative, will host an online, interdisciplinary panel of experts who will explore the potentially devastating interplay between climate change and psychosocial disabilities, take stock of both the current state of research on this interplay as well as the efficacy of private and public interventions at this critical intersection, and point to the roles that key stakeholders must play to prevent the ongoing mental health crisis in many parts of the world from being supercharged by the global climate emergency.

Live CART transcription will be provided. 

This event is co-sponsored by Harvard Law School Project on Disability (HPOD), The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, and GlobalMentalHealth@Harvard.