Tagged With "Hamper Australian Communities"

As temperatures rose to 111.5 degrees Fahrenheit (44.2 degrees Celsius) in Campbelltown in the Australian state of New South Wales, a colony of flying fox bats that lives near the town's train station felt the effects. Volunteers struggled to rescue the heat-stricken bats, according to the Campbelltown-Macarthur Advertiser , but at least 204 individual animals, mostly babies, died. "They basically boil," Kate Ryan, the colony manager for the Campbelltown bats, told the newspaper. "It affects...

The Daily Dose, July 22, 2019 by Carly Stern https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/tomorrows-doctors-will-diagnose-the-mental-toll-of-climate-change/95540 First-year medical student Anna Goshua was interviewing an emergency room physician in March to learn more about the job when she heard about a patient who had come all the way from Puerto Rico to that ER in Massachusetts for health care. Hurricane Maria had wiped out all prospects of the patient seeking care at home. A surprised Goshua pored...

This coming Wednesday, The Lancet Countdown will release its first annual report tracking climate change and health indicators across five key domains (including Mental Health) on November 1 ( live in Berkeley , or via Livestream ). (Report attached below.) All of the speakers could and should be invited to the upcoming California Preparing Individuals for Climate Change Conference. Unfortunately, I am unable to attend. Climate Change: The Defining Health Challenge and Opportunity of the...

In 2018, a study from the University of Newcastle in NSW found that farmers in rural parts of the state experienced “significant stress about the effects of drought on themselves, their families, and their communities.” Other research suggests that income insecurity related to drought increases the risk of suicide among farmers. Throughout Australia, rates of suicide have increased dramatically for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people over the past 30 years. The rise is due to...

This is one of the better assessments of the psychological and psychosocial impacts of climate change, though it neglects some key issues. International Journal of Mental Health Systems, October 2018, by Katie Hayes et al. Abstract Background: This article provides an overview of the current and projected climate change risks and impacts to mental health and provides recommendations for priority actions to address the mental health consequences of climate change. Discussion and conclusion:...

Rowan Walrath, Feb 18, 2019 Mother Jones Over the last year, Rebecca, a 35-year-old woman living in Washington, DC, had been losing sleep over the seemingly endless flow of apocalyptic environmental news. She fretted about the Trump administration’s loosening of emissions regulations and the United Nations’ dire predictions about climate change. In October, she sought help from a psychiatrist who put her on an antidepressant. “It sort of saps your emotional reserves,” she says, “this...

By Erin Smith and Frederick M. Burkle, Medical Xpress, February 14, 2020 Most of us are probably familiar with the concept of psychological trauma, the impact on an individual's psyche caused by an extremely distressing event. But there's another kind of trauma. A collective disturbance that occurs within a group of people when their world is suddenly upended. Consider the Buffalo Creek flood of 1972, in which a dam burst at a West Virginia coalmine, inundating the town and killing 132...

Wilderness expert and renowned mindfulness teacher Mark Coleman shares how he is learning to hold the intense beauty of nature—and devastation of climate change—in his mindfulness practice. Today, because of climate crisis and changing ecology, the sense of finding nature as source of nourishment is changing. We now live in an era where the impacts of global warming—unprecedented forest fires, species extinction, coral reef deaths—are impossible to ignore. Our very experience of nature is...