Italy’s brutal heatwaves have so far driven a 20% rise in the number of emergency room visits for mental-health issues this summer, Italian health bodies said Wednesday.
“This summer’s extreme heat has also caused up to a 20% increase in visits for psychiatric disorders to some Italian emergency rooms compared to three years ago,” said a statement by Simeu (Italian Society of Emergency Medicine) and SIEP (Italian Society of Psychiatric Epidemiology), confirming that the phenomenon is not marginal but structural.
Extreme heat, the statement emphasizes, can aggravate anxiety, mood disorders, and other psychiatric conditions, and promote psychotic disorders, depressive episodes, and self-harm.
For this reason, the two societies are calling for people with mental disorders to be explicitly recognized among vulnerable groups in national heatwave prevention plans.
A special role In this context, Simeu and Siep explain, psychotropic drug therapies are at risk: the real pharmacological risk concerns molecules with anticholinergic action, which inhibit sweating, but the greatest danger remains improper or self-managed discontinuation of therapies, a major cause of relapse.
Social isolation and housing insecurity also contribute to making people with mental disorders more vulnerable, with homes often lacking air conditioning or adequate thermal insulation.
