Does the weather affect young people’s mental health? One study suggests it may
The weather could play a role in young people’s mental well-being, according to a new study in the Netherlands and Spain.
Researchers led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) found that in the Netherlands, exposure to cold temperatures over time was associated with internalising problems such as anxiety, depression, being withdrawn, and other complaints among adolescents and young adults.
Meanwhile, higher heat levels in Spain were tied to attention problems, according to the study, which was published in the journal JAMA Network Open.
The analysis included about 3,900 adolescents in the Netherlands and nearly 900 in Spain between 2015 and 2022. It tracked the weather between three days and two months before the teens’ reported psychiatric symptoms.
The findings suggest that young people’s mental health could worsen as climate change leads to more extreme temperatures, according to Esmée Essers, a predoctoral fellow at ISGlobal and the study’s lead author.
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“It is of utmost importance to understand how mental health in developing young adults is affected” by climate change, Essers told Euronews Health.
The study doesn’t prove that temperature affects mental health directly, only that the two are related.
But Essers said it’s possible that extreme weather disrupts the body’s ability to maintain a stable internal temperature, triggering “stress and inflammatory pathways” that could be the key to certain mental health problems.
Other studies have explored the link between climate change and mental health. Over a 45-year period in Switzerland, for example, hospitalisations for mental disorders rose by 4 per cent for every 10°C increase in average daily temperature.
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A 2023 review in The Lancet Planetary Health journal concluded that higher temperatures and changes in weather could be associated with more suicides and suicidal behaviour, as well as hospital admissions for mental illness and “poor community health and wellbeing”.
Surprising findings
Notably, the new analysis did not identify a link between heat and aggression, which was “somewhat surprising” given other research has shown that violent crime increases during heatwaves, Rhiannon Thompson, a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London who led the 2023 review, told Euronews Health.
However, Thompson said, “externalising symptoms are broader than just aggression and this particular study is in adolescents, who could respond differently than adults”.
Another theory: Spain simply didn’t get hot enough to prompt that kind of reaction, Essers said.
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“It might be that the warm temperatures the adolescent population in this study experienced were not to an extreme enough degree to lead individuals to feel significantly increased discomfort that warrants aggressive behaviour,” she said.
The study also found no link when looking at cold weather in Spain or heat in the Netherlands, which researchers said was also probably a result of the typical weather patterns in those countries.
Another surprising finding was that air conditioning didn’t appear to offset the effects of heat in Spain, said Dr Thomas Müller, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Bern who co-led the 45-year Swiss study on rising temperatures and mental health hospitalisations.
“I always recommend for psychiatric hospitals that there should be cooling against aggression – but I guess people are going out and [they] feel the impact of the weather,” he told Euronews Health.
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Müller, who was not involved with the new study, added that more research is needed on the topic.
The study has some limitations. The data on young people’s mental health symptoms came from their mothers, which may not be as accurate as a psychiatric diagnosis or self-reported symptoms.
The findings may also not be transferable to other settings.
But given most research focuses on high heat and severe mental health issues, and there is little data on the role of cold weather, “it is still a really important study,” Thompson said.
