Mental Health Impacts of Tornadoes: A Systematic Review

PTSD risk factors in earthquake survivors and their families: a systematic review

Background: Exposure to earthquakes can cause adverse effects on the mental health of survivors, including an increased risk of PTSD.Objective: This systematic review aims to analyse the previous secondary studies to identify the risk factors for PTSD from children to elderly earthquake survivors. In addition, it aims to consider the complexity of the joint effects of the individual, relational, and contextual risk factors, to also detect the most at-risk families.Method: After reviewing and screening studies from the literature search through PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, and EBSCO under the guidance of PRISMA guidelines, ten eligible secondary studies were identified that examine the risk factors for PTSD in individuals (from children to elderly) affected by worldwide earthquakes.Results: The analysis of the included studies allowed the identification of a series of socio-demographic, pre-traumatic, peri-traumatic, and post-traumatic PTSD risk factors in children, adolescents, youth, adults, and elderly survivors. The results represent the complexity of the joint effects of these risk factors at individual, relational, and contextual levels.Conclusions: The consideration of the PTSD risk factors highlights the importance of individual characteristics and the type of experiences and exposure in the period before, during, and after the earthquake. This knowledge could allow the early identification of at-risk individuals of different ages and families and the implementation of intervention programmes.

Intersections of Intimate Partner Violence and Natural Disasters: A Systematic Review of the Quantitative Evidence

Natural disasters and extreme weather events are increasing in both intensity and frequency. Emerging evidence suggests that there is a relationship between intimate partner violence (IPV) and natural disasters. However, there is a scarcity of methodologically sound research in this area with no systematic review to date. To address the gap, this paper systematically assesses the quantitative evidence on the association between IPV with natural disasters between 1990 and March 2023. There were 27 articles that meet the inclusion criteria for the data extraction process. A quantitative critical appraisal tool was used to assess the quality of each study and a narrative synthesis approach to explore the findings. The review found an association between IPV and disasters, across disaster types and countries. However, more research is needed to explore the nuances and gaps within the existing knowledge base. It was unclear whether this relationship was causal or if natural disasters heightened existing risk factors. Further, it is inconclusive as to whether disasters create new cases of IPV or exacerbate existing violence. The majority of studies focused on hurricanes and earthquakes with a dearth of research on "slow onset disasters." These gaps represent the need for further research. Further research can provide a more thorough understanding of IPV and natural disasters, increasing stakeholders' ability to strengthen community capacity and reduce IPV when natural disasters occur.

Post-traumatic stress and depression following disaster: examining the mediating role of disaster resilience

The current study used structural equation modeling to examine the role of disaster resilience as a mediator between disaster exposure and post-traumatic stress and depressive symptoms among a sample of 625 U.S. adults who experienced a disaster event. Results found that disaster resilience mediated the relationship between disaster exposure as a predictor and depression and post-traumatic stress as dependent variables. These findings have important implications for understanding the mechanisms by which disaster resilience supports post-disaster mental health and can inform future disaster mental health interventions and practice models.

Using iterative random forest to find geospatial environmental and Sociodemographic predictors of suicide attempts

Introduction

Despite a recent global decrease in suicide rates, death by suicide has increased in the United States. It is therefore imperative to identify the risk factors associated with suicide attempts to combat this growing epidemic. In this study, we aim to identify potential risk factors of suicide attempt using geospatial features in an Artificial intelligence framework.

Methods

We use iterative Random Forest, an explainable artificial intelligence method, to predict suicide attempts using data from the Million Veteran Program. This cohort incorporated 405,540 patients with 391,409 controls and 14,131 attempts. Our predictive model incorporates multiple climatic features at ZIP-code-level geospatial resolution. We additionally consider demographic features from the American Community Survey as well as the number of firearms and alcohol vendors per 10,000 people to assess the contributions of proximal environment, access to means, and restraint decrease to suicide attempts. In total 1,784 features were included in the predictive model.

Results

Our results show that geographic areas with higher concentrations of married males living with spouses are predictive of lower rates of suicide attempts, whereas geographic areas where males are more likely to live alone and to rent housing are predictive of higher rates of suicide attempts. We also identified climatic features that were associated with suicide attempt risk by age group. Additionally, we observed that firearms and alcohol vendors were associated with increased risk for suicide attempts irrespective of the age group examined, but that their effects were small in comparison to the top features.

Discussion

Taken together, our findings highlight the importance of social determinants and environmental factors in understanding suicide risk among veterans.

Planetary Health and Mental Health Nexus: Benefit of Environmental Management

Background

Human activities have induced unprecedented global shifts in natural systems including the climate, the oceans, cryosphere and biosphere. The impacts of these changes on physical health are clear and are accelerating at an alarming rate. Climate change and its consequences, especially disruptive events like floods, droughts and heat waves also impact the mental health of affected populations, increasing risk for post-traumatic stress, depression and anxiety disorders. However, the impact of climate change on mental health is not well examined and has received less attention than climate's impacts on physical health.

Goal

The paper examines the planetary health-mental health nexus. It assesses the existing state of knowledge on the association between climate events, natural disasters, pollution, access to green space and mental health. It also presents a global analysis of the economic costs of climate-related mental health disorders by developing scenarios estimating the costs of mental illness at the country level predicted to be attributable to changes in environmental factors during the period 2020-2050.

Findings

Globally, the additional societal costs of mental disorders due to changes in climate-related hazards, air pollution and inadequate access to green space are estimated to be almost US$47 billion annually in 2030. These estimated costs will continue to grow exponentially to US$537 billion in 2050, relative to a baseline scenario in which these environmental factors remain at 2020 levels.

Conclusions

Our scenario analysis shows that the costs associated with climate-related mental health morbidity and mortality are high already and continue to will increase sharply in coming decades. There is need therefore to strengthen the evidence linking climate change to mental health and to prioritize the development of evidence-based and impactful interventions to address the global burden of environment-related mental disorders.