The hidden mental health cost of climate distress

A new Stanford-led study sheds light on “an emerging psychological health crisis” that disproportionately affects girls. Published July 30 in The Lancet Planetary Health, the study is among the first to quantify how repeated climate stressors impact the psychological well-being and future outlook of adolescents in low-resource settings. Researchers from Stanford’s schools of Medicine, Law, and Sustainability partnered with health experts in Bangladesh to survey more than 1,000 teenagers and conduct focus groups across two regions with starkly different flood exposure.

“What we found really lifts the voices of frontline adolescents – a group whose perspectives and health outcomes are so rarely investigated and communicated,” said lead author Liza Goldberg, an incoming Earth system science PhD student in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

Graph showing flood-prone areas of Bangladesh.

Teens in flood-prone Barisal, Bangladesh, were nearly twice as likely to show signs of anxiety and more than three times as likely to experience depressive symptoms compared to peers in relatively more flood-safe Dhaka, the country’s capital city. Girls were nearly twice as likely to show signs of anxiety, often driven by worry over potential household stress and domestic violence that might result from natural disasters.

“Fears around climate change may be a central contributor to everyday wellbeing,” said Goldberg, a 2024 graduate of Stanford's Earth Systems Program. “We were shocked by the rates of climate distress we observed, particularly the feeling that environmental changes are derailing young people’s sense of purpose and possibility.”

Image of Stanford researchers and others conducting focus group discussions in Barisal, Bangladesh.

Stanford researchers and others conducting focus group discussions in Barisal, Bangladesh. | Shahid Atonu Sarkar

The study’s qualitative findings paint a vivid picture of how extreme weather affects young people’s mental state and life decisions. In Barisal, adolescents described how financial strain from frequent flooding has forced families to abandon dreams of higher education and stable work, replacing them with fatalism, household conflict, early marriage, and deep emotional strain.

“The perspectives of these adolescents, especially the girls, who live in some of the world’s most climate-affected communities demonstrate the human price of climate change, and underscore the importance of addressing it,” said study co-author Stephen Luby, the Lucy Becker Professor of Medicine in the Stanford School of Medicine.

Image displaying quotes from flood victims expressing their anxiety.

Across the study population, symptoms of anxiety were strongly linked to what researchers call “temporal discounting” – a tendency to avoid long-term planning in favor of short-term decisions. When families are focused only on getting through the day, they may make minor annual adjustments, like raising a home by a few inches, instead of making more significant investments – like moving away from a river or using flood-resistant building materials – that would ensure their long-term safety and resilience.

“This study marks a critical turning point in recognizing the mental health crisis silently unfolding among climate-vulnerable adolescents,” said study coauthor Farjana Jahan, an associate scientist at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh. “It brings evidence to what communities have long felt but could not quantify – that the climate crisis is also a psychological one.”

The researchers call for investment in community-driven mental health interventions – particularly those tailored to adolescents and informed by their lived experience as well as gender-sensitive climate resilience interventions, such as programs that protect girls' educational and economic opportunities during and after climate disasters.

“This is about more than mental health,” said study co-author Gabrielle Wong-Parodi, an associate professor of Earth system science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. “Our findings suggest that cognitive overload and despair are making it harder for vulnerable communities to adapt to climate change. If young people can't plan for their future, the entire community's resilience is at risk.”

The study was funded by the National Geographic Society, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment’s Mentoring Undergraduates in Interdisciplinary Research (MUIR) program, and the Stanford School of Medicine

Luby is also director of research at the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and a member of Stanford Bio-X and the Stanford Maternal & Child Health Research Institute.

This story was originally published by Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.