Many people wondered whether it would ever look the same again. If this was something that a person saw from their house every day or was an area where they spent a lot of time with their family and they have memories from that region, it was really sad. If you drove down to this area and you saw what the landscape looked like afterwards, it was like black toothpicks. We have a lot of wildfires in Alaska, but there's also a lot of wild space so there aren't very many wildfires that are as close to communities as this one was. Something else we heard a lot about was grief after the fire was over. And even people who weren't stressed at the beginning were really stressed by the end. Many people were feeling really pinned in - like they couldn't go anywhere. And when the wildfire was right next to the road and was even jumping it at times, that caused huge issues with traffic control and whether people were allowed to evacuate or not evacuate. For some that was from the smoke, but for those that were in Kenai, there's basically one road through there that accesses all of those communities. They were feeling closed in and having feelings of isolation or claustrophobia. One of the things people talked about was feeling trapped. What were some of the top things you heard from people in your study? That's been the main thread of climate and mental health work so far. But that's not focused so much on a specific disaster or an acute event, but more on the concept of climate change itself and people having this feeling in their core about what's going on. There's been a pickup of research around mental health and climate change more broadly, including by a researcher in Canada who's been working on climate change and ecological grief. There's very little in the United States. And most of the other research is a little bit older and has come from Australia. We're working on a literature review of wildfires and mental health to see what else is out there. Together we honed in on wildfires in Alaska and thought about the mental health impacts because it overlapped with our areas of expertise and was a super understudied area. That's one of the very typical health impacts that we think about with wildfires.īut through a colleague I got connected with my collaborators at Johns Hopkins University and McGill University, who come from a background in mental health research and disaster response. Previously I've done work looking at the cardiorespiratory impacts from wildfire smoke. I'm an epidemiologist and I try to understand more about how climate change is impacting the health of communities - particularly in Alaska, where I'm a professor. Why did you decide to study wildfires and mental health? That extended period of multiple stressors - over many months - took a toll on people's long-term mental health, according to preliminary results from the Southcentral Wildfire Study, which examined the community's experience of the Swan Lake fire.Īs dozens of major wildfires burn across the American West, Siberia and other parts of the globe, we spoke with study coauthor Micah Hahn, an assistant professor of environmental health in University of Alaska Anchorage's Institute for Circumpolar Health Studies, about why there's much more that communities can do than just prepare physically for wildfires in their communities. And some communities were told to prepare for evacuations. Drought and unusually hot temperatures fanned the flames as the fire moved toward communities, growing to 170,000 acres over nearly four months.ĭuring that time, residents of the Kenai Peninsula and nearby Anchorage battled suffocating smoke. doi:10.1016/j.jaac.2010.05.017.This article originally appeared on The Revelator.Īlaska's Swan Lake fire started with a lightning strike on Jin Kenai National Wildlife Refuge Wilderness. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Lifetime Prevalence of Mental Disorders in US Adolescents: Results from the National Comorbidity Study-Adolescent Supplement (NCS-A).