“Every second person in Joshimath looks worried, dark circles under the eyes, unruly hair, unwashed,” The Hindu reported earlier this year. “This town, which used to be full of happy faces, now looks gloomy. No one talks to each other anymore. They all have their own sorrows.”
Tales of terror, trepidation, and trauma after climate-induced disasters aren’t uncommon. For example, after the 2021 Chamoli floods, people reported being afraid to work at night: “They think the dead workers are talking to them,” one report quoted a rescue worker saying.
The report also documented the macabre nightmares of Chamoli residents. A 62-year-old woman whose son was buried under the debris from the flood said she saw him in her dreams, asking her to help “dig out his body”.
Distressing dreams and flashbacks are well-known symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a mental health condition that often affects individuals who have experienced a particularly distressing event in the recent past.
While climate-induced disasters aren’t the only cause of an increased incidence of PTSD, they pose unique challenges to people directly at risk of being affected by these disasters for two reasons.
First, climate-induced disasters – unlike other natural disasters – tend to get progressively worse.
Second, these disasters unsettle people’s daily lives in insidious and prolonged ways. For example, Jyoti Mishra, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, and the co-director of its Climate Change and Mental Health Initiative, highlighted a constant dilemma that residents of a climate change-hit place might face: “Do I want to leave the place that I have always lived in, where I have my community and strong social ties, versus preparing for impending disaster, which would happen because the same areas keep getting impacted again and again?”
As climate-induced disasters become more frequent and more intense worldwide, experts told The Hindu that they don’t just augur a mental health crisis. They could also bring about a fundamental shift in the way people think.
Climate trauma
A resident shows cracks that appeared in a house at Bahuguna Nagar, Karnaprayag, in Chamoli district, January 31, 2023. After Joshimath, cracks appeared in houses in Karnaprayag as well. | Photo Credit: PTI
In California, increasing aridity, due to global warming, has triggered a remarkable increase in the number of forest wildfires, so much so that the state now has a yearly fire season. In 2018, a series of wildfires ravaged the state to the point where the Northern California administration declared them a ‘national emergency’.
When Dr. Mishra and her team studied the mental-health impact of the 2018 fires, they found that people directly exposed to the fires had more symptoms of PTSD, major depressive disorder (MDD), and general anxiety disorder (GAD).
“...[Climate]-related extremes, such as fires, are significantly associated with sequelae of severely impacted mental wellbeing,” her group wrote in a 2021 paper.
The greater susceptibility of people to mental health conditions as a result of climate-induced disasters is called ‘climate trauma’.
Like birds, like humans
An aerial view of the washed-away Tapovan hydroelectric power plant after the glacier burst in Chamoli district, Uttarakhand, February 12, 2021. | Photo Credit: PTI
Sanjay Kalra, an endocrinologist working in Karnal, Haryana, told The Hindu that the human brain might be affected down to the molecular level as a result of sustained distress. Three neurotransmitters – chemicals secreted in small quantities in the brain – are produced in response to stress, he said: dopamine, adrenaline, and noradrenaline.
In the short-term, these chemicals are secreted only intermittently and in response to stressors. In wild birds, for example, researchers have found that the increased activation of a dopamine receptor – a protein to which dopamine binds to elicit its effects – is a response to short-term stress.
Similarly, according to Dr. Kalra, a student appearing for an examination could be secreting more dopamine to cope with stress and anxiety. Such short-term activation of these neurobiological pathways are adaptive responses, he said.
But when these neurotransmitters are secreted continuously, the body’s response becomes maladaptive. Dr. Kalra: “As these chemicals are secreted 24/7, as it might be happening with Joshimath residents, their levels remain so high and they remain high so continuously that they just lose their impact.”
As a result, an individual’s ability to cope with stress decreases significantly over time, leading to the development of PTSD-like symptoms.
Even in the case of wild songbirds held in captivity, the level of dopamine receptors decreases over time, eventually leading to an increase in anxiety-related behaviours.
Interference processing
A firefighter aims to control a new wildfire in Duarte, California, June 12, 2022. | Photo Credit: Reuters/David Swanson
Earlier this year, Dr. Mishra and her colleagues investigated whether people impacted by the Camp Fire incident – the most devastating of California’s 2018 wildfires – showed changes in their brain function. Their results were published by the journal PLoS Climate on January 18 this year.
They used a series of cognitive tests to evaluate an individual’s selective attention, interference processing, working memory, and emotional-interference processing. They supplemented their study with electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings.
Selective attention is the cognitive process by which individuals focus on a particular stimulus while suppressing other distracting or irrelevant stimuli.
Interference is the process by which memories steep into each other, making it difficult to retrieve information accurately and precisely over time. Both old and new memories interfere with each other’s recall. For instance, when moving into a new house, people might find that they end up writing their older address in correspondence. Researchers have attributed such proactive interference to the number of times a memory has been recalled.
On the flip side, retroactive interference happens when newer memories hamper the recall of older memories. A musician, for example, could have a harder time recalling an older piece after having learned to play a new one.
Emotional interference is when an emotional stimulus – one that forebodes danger, for example – affects the cognitive control required to complete a task.
Working memory is a kind of short-term memory that lets us hold and manipulate temporary information and affects reasoning and decision-making.
In their PLoS Climate study, Dr. Mishra & co. reported that victims affected by the Camp Fire blaze were significantly less accurate in tasks that measured interference processing compared with those who had never experienced such wildfires. As she told The Hindu, the “fire-exposed participants were more distracted”.
“If you’re asking people to pay attention to something, then everything else is distracting them much more.”
Dr. Mishra also noted that their participants were “putting in much more cognitive effort [in a task].” That is, “their brain activity is much greater than those who are not exposed to these disasters,” she said.
Why must that be? “When we’re stressed, we don’t know where the dangers are coming from,” Dr. Mishra explained. “What should be a distraction also feels like a relevant threat. That’s why one can’t suppress distractions very well.”
Displacement and rehabilitation
People walk on a snow-covered road under heavy snowfall in Joshimath, Chamoli district. | Photo Credit: Rahul Grover/ANI
Captivity for wild birds is being displaced from their natural habitat, confined to an enclosure in a laboratory. For the people of Joshimath, it’s being displaced from their homes – visibly cracked and leaning just a little more every day – to temporary shelter homes.
Rehabilitation and displacement are inevitable consequences of a sinking town. But then, so is the trauma.
People displaced by disasters – climate-induced or not – have been reported to be at higher risk of developed PTSD.
In 2016, about a million people were displaced in Indonesia by possibly climate-induced floods and landslides. Since landslides fragment communities and block access to healthcare, researchers in the US and Indonesia studied the mental health effects of landslides on people in the archipelago.
In a 2021 Environmental Health Perspectives paper, Kate Burrows & co. reported that 41.1% of their participants who had been displaced reported being economically less stable while 32.1% reported feeling the contrary.
They also found that while most participants who had been displaced reported better mental well-being, those living in unstable and/or temporary housing were “less likely to report perceived increases in mental well-being”.
This is particularly relevant vis-à-vis Joshimath, where government officials have shifted several families to temporary shelter homes after their houses were deemed “unsafe”.
According to another report by The Hindu, the district administration data had listed by the third week of January 181 damaged houses that will be eventually demolished. According to the government, 274 families and 921 people had already been moved to shelter homes.
Resilience and health vigilance
A model house being constructed under the aegis of the Tata Relief Committee at Akkaraipettai, Nagapattinam District. | Photo Credit: M. Moorthy
According to Dr. Mishra, the growing evidence for climate-induced disasters worsening mental health crises indicates the need for the people at risk to cultivate resilience. It requires “switching our processing of a disaster from an emotional response to a more logical cognitive response,” she told The Hindu.
As a first step, she said it’s important to build a detailed disaster-management plan. “Say my house did collapse today. What are my next steps? Who are my next of kin? What resources do I have? Where will I get support from?”
Dr. Kalra highlighted the importance of training people at risk in coping skills and psychological first aid (PFA). According to the American Psychiatric Association, PFA involves “an initial disaster response intervention with the goal to promote safety, stabilize survivors of disasters and connect individuals to help and resources.”
Officials have already deployed Mass PFA training exercises in different parts of the world. After the 2004 tsunami, the American Red Cross and its Sri Lankan counterpart, the Sri Lanka Red Cross Society, conducted training exercises for about 8,000 people in the island nation.
PFA has five steps: meeting basic needs of the victims/survivors of the disaster, listening to them, accepting their feelings, assisting them to move on, and referring them for treatment.
Notably, the PFA model doesn’t offer on-site therapy and is separate from clinical intervention because it “focuses on knitting together communities that have become unravelled after a disaster has struck and equipping them to face future calamities”, per one report.
Dr. Kalra also spotlighted another component of resilience in the face of climate-induced disasters: health vigilance. According to him, it is important that the government takes responsibility for following up on standard health indicators – both mental and physical – of people affected by such disasters.
This is important because, Dr. Kalra continued, disasters increase the risk of both metabolic and communicable diseases, along with mental health conditions.
Insidious
Joshimath residents taking part in a protest rally against the NTPC project in the town that has been affected by the sinking land. | Photo Credit: PTI
But is resilience the responsibility of the affected people alone? In 2019, political scientist Swarna Rajagopalan wrote: “Resilience does not absolve local and national governments of responsibility.”
The Chamoli district administration had ordered two construction companies in the district – NTPC Ltd. and Hindustan Construction Company – to make 2,000 prefabricated homes for the people of Joshimath. According to the latest reports, both are yet to act on the order. NTPC’s act of washing its hands off the rehabilitation process also irked residents, who are continuing their protest to hold the corporation accountable.
Joshimath’s people are burdened with the trauma of the steady insidiousness with which their houses may collapse – with which the town itself may disappear – as well as with their own displacement and rehabilitation.
So the slogans of the protestors rise above the humdrum of the machines. “NTPC go back” is a popular refrain. It marks the conflict between the certainty of the impending doom and the uncertainty of its amelioration.
Sayantan Datta (they/them) are a queer-trans freelance science writer, communicator and journalist. They currently work with the feminist multimedia science collective TheLifeofScience.com and tweet at @queersprings.
