Reacción a "Experiencing successive climate-related disasters is associated with greater mental health deterioration"

The study by Li and Leppold evaluated the cumulative mental health effects of successive exposure to natural disasters referenced as climate disasters using a national representative longitudinal dataset (the HILDA), between 2009 and 2019. The targeted sample (N=1511) was selected based on participants having experienced a damaged or destroyed home due to a weather-related disaster (e.g., bushfire, floods, cyclone). A socio-demographically matched comparison sample (N=3880) was included. Unfortunately, the targeted exposure sample was small in terms of the proportion of identified participants who reported experiencing two or more cumulative natural disasters.  

The key findings from this study indicate that mental health (comprising anxiety and depressive symptoms) declined for individuals exposed to two or more successive disasters. Repeated exposures to these disasters hindered or delayed recovery. These findings align with other studies indicating that cumulative disasters including life stressors can deplete people’s resilience-building capacities when faced with successive adversity, particularly when occurring in temporal proximity and includes loss of resources.  

Some key risk factors identified have important implications in terms of helping at-risk communities prepare and adapt to climate-related events. A notable finding was that individuals with chronic health conditions, impairments and disabilities, poor social support and those residing in rental homes reported a decline in mental health even after exposure to an initial disaster. This outcome further attests that exposure to significant cumulative life stressors, whether consecutive natural disasters or in combination with pre-existing health impairments and/or socio-economic hardship, can wear down people’s coping resources and attests to the need to strengthen psychological first aid and ongoing support to these more vulnerable individuals and communities.  

However, understanding the ongoing holistic needs for these communities is vital. Co-designing future support services with these communities is integral to ensure that resources will be appropriate and beneficial to at-risk individuals and communities.  

Although females, younger age adults and those residing in rural communities were more susceptible to reporting a decline in mental health symptoms following repeated disasters, the small sample size means that these findings need to be interpreted with caution, particularly as that findings were also further limited by the lack of information pertaining to the types and severity of natural events experienced.  

The financial impact of these disasters (including loss of livelihood and displacement) was also not included in the current study. Hence, these latter findings attest to the need for future research which more comprehensively measures the full impact of weather-related events in combination with ongoing life stressors, as climate-related events do not occur in a vacuum.