- Title
- Quantifying impacts of drought and heatwaves on mental health in rural Australia
- Creator
- Luong, Thi Tuyen
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2024
- Description
- Masters Research - Master of Philosophy (MPhil)
- Description
- Knowledge on the impacts of climate extremes (such as drought and heatwaves) on mental health, is essential for any efforts to promote public mental health. This is especially true in rural areas where various adversities and disadvantages exist. However, the existing literature on this topic remains limited, leaving important research gaps that need to be addressed. This thesis aims to reduce the knowledge gaps around impacts of drought and heatwaves on the mental health of rural residents in Australia in two main areas. First, there are concerns about the complexity of the relationship between drought and mental health. Little is known about how different levels of drought exposure affect (associate with) mental health, especially when a drought lasts for several years. This thesis aims to fill this gap by examining the relationship between drought and mental health, and whether this relationship changes in response to the duration of drought exposure. Second, existing studies employ various heatwave definitions to predict mental health outcomes of heatwaves, with a large focus on aggregated outcomes such as mental health-related morbidity and mortality. However, the question of whether any relationship exists between heatwaves and individual mental health outcomes is unexplored, including whether commonly used heatwave definitions are useful in predicting individual mental health outcomes, which remains unclear. This thesis, therefore, conducts a sensitivity analysis of individual mental health responses to various heatwave definitions. This thesis employs data from the Australian Rural Mental Health Study (ARMHS), a longitudinal study that investigated mental health and its determinants among rural residents in New South Wales, Australia. The use of the ARMHS dataset provides a strong foundation for the work of this thesis because it includes validated mental health measures that allow flexibility in data analysis and in examining the sensitivity of results. ARMHS contains systematically collected information on mental health determinants that may confound the relationship between drought/heatwaves and mental health. Therefore, the modelling of control variables in this research, to examine climate-mental health relationships, are well-defined from a rich and reliable source of variables. The longitudinal nature of the data also enables the research model to control for unobserved individual characteristics that tend to stabilise over time and, therefore, more accurately investigate mental health responses to changes in climate exposure longitudinally. With the above-mentioned strengths, the work of this thesis reports several novel findings. This thesis offers new insights into relationships between drought and mental health. In particular, the results derived in Chapter 3 indicate that effects of drought exposure on mental health are more complicated than common notions of negative impacts predicted by most previous studies. Specifically, the drought-psychological distress relationship follows an inverted U-shape where psychological distress increases and then dissipates after a few years of drought exposure, however the decrease in distress does not necessarily relate to improved mental health, as life satisfaction remains negative. These findings should be taken into consideration by policy makers. They highlight the need for sustained support to mitigate the long-term effects of drought on mental health that may persist after a drought has apparently ended. The findings from Chapter 4 show that small changes in the heatwave definition (e.g. using differing durations of hot conditions) are associated with changes in mental health outcomes, and that several of the commonly used heatwave definitions are not well associated with mental health. Therefore, it is important to carefully consider multiple options for measuring heatwaves and mental health. The reliance on any sole approach to do so may lead to biased results. This is because the association between heatwaves and mental health relies upon the sensitivity and ambiguity of both the heatwave definition and the measure of mental health outcomes used. Recommendations from this thesis are set out in four sections: (1) future research, (2) public policy, (3) community programs and initiatives, and (4) research training and funding.
- Subject
- drought; heatwaves; mental health; rural; Australia
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1514852
- Identifier
- uon:56862
- Rights
- Copyright 2024 Thi Tuyen Luong
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 3 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 261 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |