The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

One especially detailed study examined the mental health fallout from Hurricane Mitch, a Category 5 storm and the second-deadliest Atlantic hurricane on record, which struck Central America in 1998, leaving 11,000 dead. In Posoltega, the most hard-hit region of Nicaragua, children had a 27 percent chance of having been seriously injured, a 31 percent chance of having lost a family member, and a 63 percent chance of their home having been damaged or destroyed. You can imagine the aftereffects. Ninety percent of adolescents in the area were left with PTSD, with the average adolescent boy registering at the high end of the range of “severe” PTSD, and the average teenage girl registering over the threshold of “very severe.” Six months after the storm, four out of every five teenage survivors from Posoltega suffered from depression; more than half, the study found, compulsively nursed what the authors called, a bit euphemistically, “vengeful thoughts.”