Research predicts serious mental health effects from Gulf oil spill

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

The Gulf of Mexico, as the recent oil spill reminded us, is a landscape, a way of life, and an entire economy. So what happens what all of that is threatened? Researcher Deborah Du Nann Winter, professor of psychology at Whitman College, predicts a significant uptick in depression and withdrawal in a new interview with Ecopsychology.

As the journal's name suggests, a field is cropping up around the potential psychological effects of ecological disasters — which we will increasingly face as the climate unravels (today: Earl).

A study in the November issue of Psychological Medicine predicted that climate change will have serious effects on global mental health. With the rise of natural disasters such as floods — which are like the oil spill in their human effects — post-traumatic stress disorder and major depression will rise. Forced migrations will also feed mental illness.

Loss of your way of life, an abyss into which Gulf fishermen are still peering, is not easy to take.

And those who already suffer from mental illness — who may have inadequate housing and pre-existing physical conditions — will be hit hardest, according to the Psychological Medicine study.

Indeed, environmental anger, Dr. Winter told Ecopsychology is "a way of masking the really unfathomable and profound despair that is just under the surface as we watch this catastrophe unfold." She was referring to the BP oil spill, but she could just as well have been describing climate change.