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Rising Suicide Rates in a Warming World
Why climate change could fuel the next big mental health crisis
Links between suicide and changes in weather have existed since the 1880s when Italian physician Enrico Morselli compiled data from twenty-eight European countries and found higher rates of suicide in the summer months. He noted the regularity of suicide statistics was “too great for it to be attributed to chance of the human will.”
More recently, a heatwave in the UK during the summer of 1995 led to a 46.9% increase in suicide. Every 1-degree increase in mean temperature above 18C was associated with a 4–5% rise.
Similarly, a study explored death records and temperature variations in Finland from 1751 to 2008 and found that temperature variability explained more than 60% total variance up until the beginning of a national suicide prevention program.
Naturally, there are considerable difficulties in establishing direct causality. Several other factors also contribute to suicide, for example, socio-economic issues such as financial security and relationship stressors as well as previous mental health difficulties.
Such studies have suffered considerable obstacles in methodology such as varying social patterns and day length that had made a direct link to temperature…
