Lesson Plan: Climate Change Impacts on Mental Health

This resource can be accessed here.

Instruct your students to read Section 3: What Are the Psychosocial Impacts of Climate Change? Pages 42-49 and Section 4: How Do People Adapt to and Cope With the Perceived Threat and Unfolding Impacts of Climate Change? Pages 52-61.

You can use this resource to provide an overview to your students on the psychosocial and mental health impacts of climate change and its impacts. Discuss the issue with your students and emphasize the following main points from the readings.

1.       Psychosocial and Mental Health Impacts of Climate Change

2.       Social and Community impacts of climate change

3.       Psychosocial Mediators of Climate Change Impacts

4.       Global Climate Change in Context of Other Environmental Challenges

5.       Psychological Benefits Associated With Responding to Climate Change

6.       Relationship Between Psychosocial Impacts and Coping

7.       How Do People Adapt to and Cope With the Perceived Threat of Climate Change?

8.       Climate Change Threat and Environmental Impacts as Stressors

9.       Mediating Relations Between Stressors and Coping Responses

10.   Types of Coping Responses

11.   Interventions

This resource can be accessed here.

In this video Prof Clayton discusses why it is important to discuss the health impacts of climate change, particularly the mental health and well-being aspects. Have your students watch this video lecture and conduct a classroom discussion. Emphasize the main points of the lecture in your discussion including the complexities of climate change and health impacts and how climate change can have direct or indirect effects on mental health and well- being and that these can be acute or gradual. Discuss the multi-layered and interconnectedness of physical impacts, human systems and infrastructure impacts, and human health impacts of climate change. Further stress on the connections between the mental, physical and community health of human health impacts of climate change. Note all the psychosocial and mental health consequences of global warming such as anxiety, stress, post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd), grief, chronic psychological dysfunction, and depression. Also draw your students’ attention to how people are responsive to messages around health and so it can be an effective way to addressing the climate crisis.

This teaching module serves as an excellent resource for your students to learn about the impacts of climate change on human health. The topics in the module are Temperature-related Death and Illness; Air Quality Impacts; Extreme Events; Vector-Borne Diseases; Water-Related Illness; Food Safety, Nutrition, and Distribution; and Mental Health and Well-Being.

This resource can be accessed here.

Direct your students to Chapter 8: Mental Health and Well-Being. Have your students read the chapter and do the suggested exercises. Discuss with your students the pathways of Climate Drivers such as altered weather patterns, temperature changes; Exposure Pathways; Mental Health Outcomes such as anxiety, emotional stress, acute traumatic stress, post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd), grief, chronic psychological dysfunction, depression, poor concentration, sleep disorders amongst others; and Vulnerable Populations like children, the elderly, women (especially pregnant and postpartum women), people with

pre-existing mental illness, economically disadvantaged and homeless and others.