Health in 2025: Is there any hope for our mental health system?
It’s said that 50% of people across their lifetime experience mental illness, but this research is out-of-date.
Online only
In the second of a three-part online only feature on health in 2025, Dionne Christian looks at climate change, and mental health. Yesterday: Infectious illnesses we’ll continue to read more about as the year progresses; Tomorrow: Risk factors for chronic illnesses.
Around the world, it is recognised that our warming planet will bring more infectious diseases via biting insects, “species leap” and contaminated food and drinking water. Sally Blundell’s recent Listener story Warming world, emerging viruses: The new health threats facing NZ gave several examples of this.
Blundell wrote: “Climate change, with its volatile tailwind of rising temperatures, increasing humidity, changing rainfall, warmer oceans, drought and extreme weather events, is upping the ante, setting up the right environmental conditions for new and more hardy pests and pathogens around the planet.”
They include mosquitoes capable of carrying yellow fever, chikungunya, dengue and zika infections moving into new habitats.
“Already, yellow fever mosquito (Aedes aegypti) and tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus), the key reservoirs of chikungunya, dengue and zika infections, have been intercepted in New Zealand ports. There are no breeding populations here but temperatures in the northern parts of the country are edging closer to those required by the Aedes species to survive the winter.”
Additionally, Blundell noted that heavy rain can wash giardia and cryptosporidium cysts and campylobacter bacteria into waterways, where they can contaminate drinking water, as has been seen in Havelock North.
If climate change is one reason why infectious diseases are becoming more common, impacting on our physical health, it’s also now linked with rising rates of mental health issues. Climate anxiety is very real, but it is far from the only thing fuelling rising rates of mental distress, especially for young people, says Shaun Robinson, chief executive, Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand.
Robinson points to a long list of issues including global social and political upheaval, hate speech and division around race and gender identity and inequality.
“Young people are right at the place where the hammer hits the anvil,” he says. “They’re looking into the future and seeing a lot of concerning and confusing signs at a time when they’re also going through what young people have always gone through and discovering their identity and place in the world – a world that is now much more fast moving.