Climate change and mental health research methods, gaps, and priorities: a scoping review.

Research on climate change and mental health is a new but rapidly growing field. To summarise key advances and gaps in the current state of climate change and mental health studies, we conducted a scoping review that comprehensively examined research methodologies using large-scale datasets. We identified 56 eligible articles published in Embase, PubMed, PsycInfo, and Web of Science between Jan 1, 2000, and Aug 9, 2020. The primary data collection method used was surveys, which focused on self-reported mental health effects due to acute and subacute climate events. Other approaches used administrative health records to study the effect of environmental temperature on hospital admissions for mental health conditions, and national vital statistics to assess the relationship between environmental temperature and suicide rates with regression analyses. Our work highlights the need to link population-based mental health outcome databases to weather data for causal inference. Collaborations between mental health providers and data scientists can guide the formation of clinically relevant research questions on climate change.

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Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an Open Access article under the CC BY 4.0 license. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Declaration of interests ARH receives funding from the American Psychiatric Association Foundation. JA has received research funding unrelated to this work from Otsuka Pharmaceuticals and Axsome Therapeutics; editorial fees from Belvoir Publishing; and speaker's fees from the Massachusetts General Hospital Psychiatry Academy and Nevada Psychiatric Association. DC served on the Mental Health Landscape Project Advisory Panel for RAND Corporation, a project funded by Otsuka Pharmaceuticals that is unrelated to this work. WMC reports ownership of stock in General Electric, 3M, and Pfizer, unrelated to the submitted work. All other authors declare no competing interests. The funders above had no role in study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, writing of the report, or the decision to submit the paper for publication. All authors had full access to the data in the study and final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication.