"It's so hard to put tangible figures to it:" Examining climate change impacts on Inuit mental health in Nunatsiavut, Labrador.
Transformational climate change across the Circumpolar North is disrupting Indigenous Peoples’ access to land, sea, and ice, leading to emotional distress, interpersonal stress, anxiety, depression, substance use, and increased use of mental health services. While there are strong theoretical unders...
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University of Guelph
2020
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ftunivguelph:oai:atrium.lib.uoguelph.ca:10214/18149 2024-09-15T18:14:59+00:00 "It's so hard to put tangible figures to it:" Examining climate change impacts on Inuit mental health in Nunatsiavut, Labrador. Middleton, Jacqueline Harper, Sherilee Cunsolo, Ashlee Jones-Bitton, Andria 2020-07-24 application/pdf https://hdl.handle.net/10214/18149 en eng University of Guelph https://hdl.handle.net/10214/18149 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ mental health climate change Inuit Nunatsiavut Circumpolar weather seasonality mental wellness Thesis 2020 ftunivguelph 2024-08-20T23:47:41Z Transformational climate change across the Circumpolar North is disrupting Indigenous Peoples’ access to land, sea, and ice, leading to emotional distress, interpersonal stress, anxiety, depression, substance use, and increased use of mental health services. While there are strong theoretical understandings of the mechanisms that link climate and mental health, there is relatively little known about how the mental health of the most climate-sensitive populations is being impacted. Therefore, this research used a community-driven population health approach to examine how weather and seasonality impacts Inuit mental health in Nunatsiavut, Labrador, Canada in the context of climate change. First, a scoping review explored global Indigenous climate-mental health relationships. This review characterized the ways in which the emotional and psychological impacts of climate are connected to changing place attachment, disrupted cultural continuity, forced human mobility, and intangible loss and damages. Then, to characterize the lived experiences of climate impacts on Inuit mental health, in-depth interviews from across Nunatsiavut (n=116 interviews) were analysed. Results indicated that weather impacted mental wellness through: shaping daily lived experiences including connection to place; altering mood and emotion on a transient basis; and seasonally influencing individual and community wellbeing. To examine these climate-mental health interconnections in Nunatsiavut, a regional time series analysis examined quantitative associations between temperature and mental health clinic visits. Mental health clinic visits significantly increased following warmer temperatures and decreased following temperature ranges that allow land use and access. These results demonstrated the important role that temperature plays in Inuit mental health; however, these impacts on mental health will not be uniformly distributed across communities. To understand the distribution of weather-mental health associations among communities, time ... Thesis inuit University of Guelph: DSpace digital archive |
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Open Polar |
collection |
University of Guelph: DSpace digital archive |
op_collection_id |
ftunivguelph |
language |
English |
topic |
mental health climate change Inuit Nunatsiavut Circumpolar weather seasonality mental wellness |
spellingShingle |
mental health climate change Inuit Nunatsiavut Circumpolar weather seasonality mental wellness Middleton, Jacqueline "It's so hard to put tangible figures to it:" Examining climate change impacts on Inuit mental health in Nunatsiavut, Labrador. |
topic_facet |
mental health climate change Inuit Nunatsiavut Circumpolar weather seasonality mental wellness |
description |
Transformational climate change across the Circumpolar North is disrupting Indigenous Peoples’ access to land, sea, and ice, leading to emotional distress, interpersonal stress, anxiety, depression, substance use, and increased use of mental health services. While there are strong theoretical understandings of the mechanisms that link climate and mental health, there is relatively little known about how the mental health of the most climate-sensitive populations is being impacted. Therefore, this research used a community-driven population health approach to examine how weather and seasonality impacts Inuit mental health in Nunatsiavut, Labrador, Canada in the context of climate change. First, a scoping review explored global Indigenous climate-mental health relationships. This review characterized the ways in which the emotional and psychological impacts of climate are connected to changing place attachment, disrupted cultural continuity, forced human mobility, and intangible loss and damages. Then, to characterize the lived experiences of climate impacts on Inuit mental health, in-depth interviews from across Nunatsiavut (n=116 interviews) were analysed. Results indicated that weather impacted mental wellness through: shaping daily lived experiences including connection to place; altering mood and emotion on a transient basis; and seasonally influencing individual and community wellbeing. To examine these climate-mental health interconnections in Nunatsiavut, a regional time series analysis examined quantitative associations between temperature and mental health clinic visits. Mental health clinic visits significantly increased following warmer temperatures and decreased following temperature ranges that allow land use and access. These results demonstrated the important role that temperature plays in Inuit mental health; however, these impacts on mental health will not be uniformly distributed across communities. To understand the distribution of weather-mental health associations among communities, time ... |
author2 |
Harper, Sherilee Cunsolo, Ashlee Jones-Bitton, Andria |
format |
Thesis |
author |
Middleton, Jacqueline |
author_facet |
Middleton, Jacqueline |
author_sort |
Middleton, Jacqueline |
title |
"It's so hard to put tangible figures to it:" Examining climate change impacts on Inuit mental health in Nunatsiavut, Labrador. |
title_short |
"It's so hard to put tangible figures to it:" Examining climate change impacts on Inuit mental health in Nunatsiavut, Labrador. |
title_full |
"It's so hard to put tangible figures to it:" Examining climate change impacts on Inuit mental health in Nunatsiavut, Labrador. |
title_fullStr |
"It's so hard to put tangible figures to it:" Examining climate change impacts on Inuit mental health in Nunatsiavut, Labrador. |
title_full_unstemmed |
"It's so hard to put tangible figures to it:" Examining climate change impacts on Inuit mental health in Nunatsiavut, Labrador. |
title_sort |
"it's so hard to put tangible figures to it:" examining climate change impacts on inuit mental health in nunatsiavut, labrador. |
publisher |
University of Guelph |
publishDate |
2020 |
url |
https://hdl.handle.net/10214/18149 |
genre |
inuit |
genre_facet |
inuit |
op_relation |
https://hdl.handle.net/10214/18149 |
op_rights |
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
_version_ |
1810452742722813952 |