Hot, and getting hotter, may mean more suicides in the future

As if the current heat wave baking the central San Joaquin Valley was not hot enough, now comes news that climate warming may lead to a rise in suicides.

This week the British medical journal Nature Climate Change reported a study led by Stanford University and UC Berkeley researchers who found that hotter temperatures correlate with more people taking their own lives. The study focused on the United States and Mexico, and examined more than 900,000 suicides dating back to 1968.

The role of rising temperatures may be as significant a suicide factor as economic hardship, the study found.

A heat wave does not equate to global warming, of course. Even if Fresno realizes a new record on Friday for most consecutive days over 100 degrees – at 22 days, a near certainty, given the weather forecast – global warming is a bigger-picture event. Still, the past three years have been the warmest on record, says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Climate change could lead to 21,770 additional suicides across the U.S. and Mexico by 2050, the study determined.

In examining more than 600 million Twitter posts to evaluate moods in varying kinds of weather, the researchers discovered that the link between suicide risk and depressive tweets was uniform for rich and poor, men and women. The study found that for every 1.8-degree Fahrenheit increase in monthly average temperatures, the rate of depressive tweets would go up by nearly 1 percent in the United States.

Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S. annually, responsible for nearly 45,000 deaths. Suicide rates have steadily climbed nationwide since 1999. The problem is significant in Fresno County as well. According to the county coroner’s office, there were 97 suicides in Fresno County in 2015 – an average of eight a month. Locally, many more men – 78 – took their own lives to women, at 19.

According to Hinds Hospice, in 2015 the Central Valley Suicide Prevention Hotline received 14,890 calls for help, and was involved with 59 active rescues of suicidal callers.

How many of those local deaths were affected by hotter temperatures is not known. And the role of other influences, like economic or relationship problems, cannot be ignored.

But study lead author Marshall Burke of Stanford told USA Today that “our findings suggest that warming can have a surprisingly large impact on suicide risk, and this matters for both our understanding of mental health as well as for what we should expect as temperatures continue to warm.”

A chilling realization in the Valley’s baking heat of July.