Gaby
Fortunately, the global suicide rate is on the decline. It could fall even faster if the world moves away from fossil fuels.
A team of researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, developed an innovative method to probe the suspected link between air pollution and suicide rates. Their results not only confirmed the connection but showed it was stronger than previously thought.
What Scientists Learned
Researchers have long known that air pollution harms physical health. In recent years they’ve found evidence that dirty air also harms mental health and contributes to higher suicide rates.
According to Dr. Tamara Carlton, the study’s lead author, the team set out to measure how much air pollution contributes to suicide rates. She and her colleagues looked at periods when PM2.5 pollution (particles 2.5 micrometers or smaller) spiked because of temperature inversions — when a layer of warm air traps colder air beneath it, preventing pollutants from dispersing. Some cities are especially prone to inversions because of surrounding hills, IFLScience reported.
Using data on sharp pollution increases in China from 2000 to 2019, the team found suicide rates rose by roughly 25% during those spikes. They wrote that the number of suicides significantly increases when air pollution is elevated.
The effect was strongest among older women, who experienced a roughly 2.5-fold larger increase in suicide risk than other groups.
Suicide as a Consequence of Poor Environmental Policy
Dr. Carlton became interested in this topic after researching how extreme heat affected suicide rates in India — one of the more alarming findings related to global warming.
She found global suicide rates have been declining despite rising temperatures. China’s suicide rate has fallen faster than anywhere else, largely because cities there have reduced air pollution by shifting from coal to renewables. Electric vehicles are also becoming more common, and gasoline- and diesel-powered cars may decline.
“Thirty years of warming in India have led to approximately the same scale of suicides as five years of fighting air pollution in China,” Dr. Carlton noted. However, she emphasized that 90 percent of suicides cannot be explained by environmental pollution.
“We often think of suicide and mental health as individual issues, but our results show government and environmental policies play a big role in preventing mental-health crises and lowering suicide rates,” she said.
The study’s findings were published in the journal Nature Sustainability.
