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Comparative Study
. 2019 Jan 10;19(1):18.
doi: 10.1186/s12888-018-2007-1.

After the Fort McMurray wildfire there are significant increases in mental health symptoms in grade 7-12 students compared to controls

Matthew R G Brown  1   2 , Vincent Agyapong  2 , Andrew J Greenshaw  2 , Ivor Cribben  3 , Pamela Brett-MacLean  2 , Julie Drolet  4 , Caroline McDonald-Harker  5 , Joy Omeje  2 , Monica Mankowsi  6 , Shannon Noble  7 , Deborah Kitching  6 , Peter H Silverstone  8
Affiliations
Comparative Study

After the Fort McMurray wildfire there are significant increases in mental health symptoms in grade 7-12 students compared to controls

Matthew R G Brown et al. BMC Psychiatry. .

Erratum in

Abstract

Background: In order to examine the impact of disasters on adolescent mental health, this study compared population mental health survey data from two communities in Alberta, Canada: Fort McMurray, which experienced a major natural disaster, and Red Deer, which did not.

Methods: Data from 3070 grade 7-12 students from Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada (collected in 2017, 18 months after the 2016 wildfire) was compared with data from 2796 grade 7-12 students from Red Deer, Alberta, Canada (collected in 2014). The same measurement scales were used for both surveys. Both of these cities have populations of approximately 100,000, and both cities are located in Alberta, Canada. For this reason, Red Deer is an appropriate non-disaster impacted community to compare to the disaster impacted community of Fort McMurray.

Results: The results of this comparison demonstrate that mental health symptoms were statistically significantly elevated in the Fort McMurray population when compared to the control population in Red Deer. This occurred for scores consistent with a diagnosis of depression (31% vs. 17%), moderately severe depression (17% vs. 9%), suicidal thinking (16% vs. 4%), and tobacco use (13% vs. 10%). Consistent with there being major mental health impacts from the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, self-esteem scores and quality of life scores were also statistically significantly lower in Fort McMurray. While the rates of anxiety disorder were similar (15% vs. 16%), the mean scores on the anxiety scale were slightly higher, with this difference reaching statistical significance. There were no statistical differences in the rates or scores for alcohol or substance use.

Conclusions: Our results are consistent with previous findings showing a significant negative impact of disasters on many aspects of adolescent mental, with a particular increase in symptoms related to depression and suicidal thinking. These findings highlight first, the need to identify adolescents most at risk of developing psychiatric symptoms after experiencing the trauma of disaster and second, the importance and necessity of implementing short and long term mental health intervention programs specifically aimed at adolescents, in order to help mitigate the negative effects of disasters on their mental health.

Keywords: Anxiety; Depression; Disaster; Mental health; PTSD; Resilience; Self-esteem; Substance use; Wildfire; Youth.

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Conflict of interest statement

Ethics approval and consent to participate

All survey data from Fort McMurray was collected under the auspices and ethical guidelines of the two Fort McMurray school systems and was administered as part of their standard curriculum and as an ongoing assessment of the educational and support programs they had put in place after the wildfire. Parents and guardians were notified of the process by written letter two weeks prior to the administration of the survey in the schools, and they had the option to opt their child(ren) out of the survey. Students had the option to participate or not in the survey, and this was explained at the start of each survey data collection session. Verbal informed consent was given by all participants. Survey participation was anonymous; participants were not asked for their names. After the data was collected, the anonymized data was made available for analysis by researchers from the University of Alberta. The analysis of the survey data was approved by the University of Alberta’s Health Research Ethics Board on June 26th, 2017 (ethics protocol number Pro00072669).

The data from Red Deer was collected through the previous EMPATHY project. The EMPATHY program was approved by the Health Research Ethics Committee of the University of Alberta on December 5th, 2013 (ethics protocol number Pro00041063).

Consent for publication

Not applicable.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests in the presentation of these findings.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

References

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