Temperature, Mental Health, and Individual Crises

This paper examines the short-term effects of temperature on mental health using variation in local temperatures and real-time data on individual mental health crisis conversations collected by the Crisis Text Line, a national text-message-based crisis hotline. We find that daily average temperatures beyond 30°C (86°F) lead to an 8 percent increase in the volume of crisis conversations relative to temperatures between 18°C and 21°C (64.4°F–69.8°F). This rise is observed across a range of crisis topics, including depression, anxiety, and suicide. We also find that the magnitude of the association with higher temperatures increases with the severity of the crisis event. Because Crisis Text Line users are predominantly young, these results offer important insights into the effects of temperature on mental health of younger populations.