Most Australians affected by a natural disaster will experience only one event, or they will have a large time gap before they experience another.

While this study provides confirmation that people who experience two or more in proximity will suffer greater mental health challenges, this group makes up just over 1 percent of the study sample, so these are fairly uncommon circumstances.

If we want to support the mental health of as many Australians as possible following natural disasters, it will still be important to largely direct our focus on the majority of people who are experiencing their first disaster, in order to maximise our impact and ensure our mental health and support services reach as many as possible.

Li and Leppold’s study contributes crucial, timely and rigorous data to the field of disaster research. Drawing on large, population-level longitudinal data, this Australian study illustrates the significant mental health burden associated with repeated exposures to climate disasters. Multiple disasters in quick succession were not only linked with greater declines in mental health, compared to one-off events, but also had longer recovery periods.

As disasters are projected to increase in frequency and severity with our changing climate, these findings highlight the urgent need for wrap-around mental health supports for communities facing consecutive disasters, particularly among identified vulnerable populations, such as younger people and those facing socioeconomic inequalities. As a country prone to extreme weather events and natural hazards, Australia represents an important research landscape for examining the potentially long-lasting mental health impacts of climate disasters, which are now being observed in record numbers across the globe.

Li and Leppold claim that for the first time they have demonstrated statistically that accumulation of two or three natural disasters, especially among the vulnerable, led to more frequent PTSD, anxiety and depression than their occurrence in individual or no disasters. With climate change producing more natural disasters, the authors warn that the mental health of the population will worsen. Their logic, backed by a wealth of statistics seems to be unassailable.

On the other hand, the study is limited to a small handful of measurable symptoms that are claimed to represent mental health. 

That assumption is questionable. The symptoms do not include a vast array of other psychological symptoms such as grief, anger, guilt, shame, and injustice. They certainly say nothing about psychosomatic consequences of disasters such as heart attacks, strokes, and a great variety of physical symptoms; and they do not represent social symptoms of disasters such as car accidents, divorces, and delinquency.

Driving down consciously, verbally and mathematically into a few symptoms and extrapolating the world according to them is typical of left brain functioning. But in disasters the right brain, with its vast array of biopsychosocial symptoms, is dominant. 

The left brain measure of the frequency of certain symptoms in recurrent disasters is valid and can be useful. 

But ignoring of the whole tapestry of human turmoil when the world rips apart has had, and could have in climate change future, dire consequences.

The study by Li and Leppold evaluated the cumulative mental health effects of successive exposure to natural disasters referenced as climate disasters using a national representative longitudinal dataset (the HILDA), between 2009 and 2019. The targeted sample (N=1511) was selected based on participants having experienced a damaged or destroyed home due to a weather-related disaster (e.g., bushfire, floods, cyclone). A socio-demographically matched comparison sample (N=3880) was included. Unfortunately, the targeted exposure sample was small in terms of the proportion of identified participants who reported experiencing two or more cumulative natural disasters.
The key findings from this study indicate that mental health (comprising anxiety and depressive symptoms) declined for individuals exposed to two or more successive disasters. Repeated exposures to these disasters hindered or delayed recovery. These findings align with other studies indicating that cumulative disasters including life stressors can deplete people’s resilience-building capacities when faced with successive adversity, particularly when occurring in temporal proximity and includes loss of resources.

Some key risk factors identified have important implications in terms of helping at-risk communities prepare and adapt to climate-related events. A notable finding was that individuals with chronic health conditions, impairments and disabilities, poor social support and those residing in rental homes reported a decline in mental health even after exposure to an initial disaster. This outcome further attests that exposure to significant cumulative life stressors, whether consecutive natural disasters or in combination with pre-existing health impairments and/or socio-economic hardship, can wear down people’s coping resources and attests to the need to strengthen psychological first aid and ongoing support to these more vulnerable individuals and communities.
However, understanding the ongoing holistic needs for these communities is vital. Co-designing future support services with these communities is integral to ensure that resources will be appropriate and beneficial to at-risk individuals and communities.
Although females, younger age adults and those residing in rural communities were more susceptible to reporting a decline in mental health symptoms following repeated disasters, the small sample size means that these findings need to be interpreted with caution, particularly as that findings were also further limited by the lack of information pertaining to the types and severity of natural events experienced.
The financial impact of these disasters (including loss of livelihood and displacement) was also not included in the current study. Hence, these latter findings attest to the need for future research which more comprehensively measures the full impact of weather-related events in combination with ongoing life stressors, as climate-related events do not occur in a vacuum.

Unfortunately it is now estimated that children born today are expected to experience seven times more disasters across their lifetimes than past generations. We need to transform the way we think about disasters to ensure people can access the support they need.

On the basis of these new findings, we argue that clinical services, such as GPs, need to screen for past disaster exposures, and emergency services need to ensure that disaster recovery programs address the interconnected effects of past and present disasters, not just the most recent disaster.