Presenter(s): Camille Sullivan − Biology
Faculty Mentor(s): Mark Carey
Poster 187
Research Area: Social Science
While pedestrian climate change knowledge likely incorporates notions of global warming exacerbating physical health conditions, mental health often remains unnoticed. This indiscernibility remains coupled with the frequent disregard of indigenous circumpolar communities by legislators who affect climate change policies, which leads to drastically disproportionate rates of mental illness and suicide within these regions. Already lacking accessibility to various traditional mental health services, many indigenous people report utilizing the land as a coping mechanism for prevailing mental health issues. However, with this Arctic land remaining among the areas most irrevocably and severely affected by climate change, feelings of sadness, frustration, and isolation emerge from the inability to comprehend a land that is now transforming in new ways after thousands of years of its identifiable patterns. Climate change spurs life-altering transformations culturally, socially, economically, and politically for many members of these communities, many of whom are unprepared to manage these startling and unjust fluctuations. Although mental health issues within indigenous Arctic communities have existed as long as the communities themselves, research on the issue was only recently popularized. These novel findings promote the urgency of incorporating indigenous perspectives into climate change legislation not only to address physical health, but also to support mental health.