Mental Health and Heat: Risk and Mitigation in Arid and Urban Climates

An extension of the human thermal comfort is the broader effect thermal conditions have on human health. In light of increased awareness of environmental factors on mental health, I use an older (19th century) theoretical relationship between nature or green infrastructure and improved mental wellbeing to explore how thermal comfort improvements can be synergized with mental wellbeing to increased psychological resilience to extreme heat. Since the 19th century, the positive relationship between cooler environments, nature contact, and mental wellbeing have been noted among urban designers and, more recently, psychologists. To study the direct effect of sensible heat on mental health, I collected health data from 2006-2014 in Maricopa County (5th most populous county in the US) and studied the hospitalization records for schizophrenia and correlated those admissions with the atmospheric environment. Using a distributed lag non-linear model to analyze the relationships, (CUT) 80,000+ cases of schizophrenia were related to the atmospheric conditions around the time of hospitalization. This research uses a distributed lagged non-linear statistical model (DLNM) of poisson regressions (CUT) to estimate the cumulative and lagged effects of temperature and thermal comfort metrics on the risk of schizophrenia hospitalization. This approach has been used in similar studies of health data and atmospheric data to examine the impact of the environment on health data (Wang et al., 2014; Hansen et al., 2008). Preliminary results show an increase in hospitalizations over the time period without a major change in overall temperature.. Finally, we look at the city’s proposed neighborhood-scale mitigation strategies with the thermal comfort benefits in mind. We generate projected changes in schizophrenia hospitalizations based on various design strategies to quantify one type of health benefit that may emerge from greater attention to thermal comfort in the design proces