After a hurricane, flood, wildfire or other disaster, a big count begins: the number of people injured and killed; buildings damaged and destroyed; hectares of land burned, flooded or contaminated. Every death is recorded, every insured home assessed, the damage to every road and bridge calculated in dollars lost. When the emergency subsides, the insurance companies settle their claims, and the federal government distributes its grants, communities are expected to rebuild. But the accounting misses an important part of the aftermath: worsening disasters leave invisible mental health crises in their wake.
A handful of studies attempted to quantify the extent and magnitude of the mental health consequences of disasters that occurred in the recent past, such as 1992’s Hurricane Andrew, 2005’s Hurricane Katrinaand 2017’s Hurricane Irma. The results point to an alarming trend: The stress and trauma of losing a loved one, seeing a home destroyed or watching a beloved community shatter has resounding mental health consequences that last for months, even years, after the disaster has taken its toll. made first impact. . Anxiety, depression, sleep disorders, post-traumatic stress, and sometimes suicidal thoughts and suicide follow disasters.
Children and adolescents—who are still learning to regulate their emotions, rely more on routine and a sense of security than most adults do, and gain social and mental stimulation from interacting with peers—are among the demographic most vulnerable to the chaos and isolation caused by extreme weather conditions.
A study published in mid-January in the Journal of Traumatic Stress analyzed survey data from more than 90,000 public school students across Puerto Rico in the months following Hurricane Maria’s landfall in September 2017. Maria, a Category 5 storm that caused widespread destruction in the northern Caribbean, killed nearly 3,000 people in Puerto Rico and caused mass blackouts that left large parts of the island without electricity and drinking water for months – a reflection of decades of disinvestment in and mismanagement of the island’s infrastructure.
About 30 percent of students surveyed five to nine months after the hurricane made landfall said they felt their lives were threatened by the storm, 46 percent said their homes were significantly damaged, and 17 percent said they were injured or a family member was injured.
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About 7 percent of the young people surveyed — about 6,300 students — developed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, after the storm. For this subset, the psychological effects of living through Maria and its aftermath were extreme.
Previous research has shown that young people are more likely to turn to alcohol as a coping mechanism after experiencing traumatic stress, a precursor to PTSD. A study published in 2021 hypothesized that children living in Louisiana exposed to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 would have higher rates of anxiety, depression, and alcohol use as teenagers than the general population in southeastern Louisiana. The researchers found a connection: the worse the traumatic stress during and after the disaster, the more likely the individual was to report drug use.
“There is an initial link that has been found in other research,” said Alejandro L. Vázquez, the lead author of the Puerto Rico study and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. But a big question remains. “The mechanism for why children use drugs in this situation is less clear,” he said. Vázquez wanted to find out which specific symptoms of traumatic stress were linked to alcohol and drug abuse in the students who suffered PTSD symptoms after Hurricane Maria. He found that anger outbursts and irritable behavior, two of the core symptoms of PTSD, were strongly correlated with self-reported substance use.
Robbie Parks, an environmental epidemiologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, called the study a “fantastic synthesis of how the hidden burden of climate-related disasters like Hurricane Maria can have long-lasting, non-obvious impacts on the way we health and well-being are maintained.” Parks was not involved in the research.
The ultimate goal of the research, Vázquez told Grist, is to arm counselors, teachers and mental health professionals with information that can help them identify PTSD as it forms in young people after a disaster and intervene before it prompts them to developing unhealthy habits. “If we think about trajectories, if you get into the habit of using these maladaptive coping strategies, you can build biological dependence on substances,” Vázquez said. “One storm can have this life-changing effect for a child.”
The result is that isolating the behaviors that can eventually lead to alcohol and drug dependence is a first step in protecting children from some of the more visceral effects of surviving a disaster like a hurricane. The study found that children who had a supportive caregiver, friend or teacher were less likely to turn to harmful coping devices. “This is consistent with the idea that the breakdown of social structures — whether climate change or otherwise — will affect the way people behave after a traumatic event,” Parks said. “This speaks to the particular vulnerability of youth in an area with scarce resources.”
More research is needed to figure out exactly how to help youth survive the mental effects of hurricanes and other extreme weather events, Vázquez said, especially as climate change becomes more severe. “There are going to continue to be intense storms with more devastation in low-lying areas like Puerto Rico that are more vulnerable,” he said.
If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 9-8-8, or the Crisis text line by texting HOME to 741741.
