Burned: Measuring the Effects of Wildfires on Suicide

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: With persistent drought and rising temperatures, wildfires in the United States have become increasingly numerous and destructive. In recent years, researchers have attempted to quantify the impacts of these wildfires across health, industrial, and environmental outcomes. One area of research in this growing body of literature that has been largely overlooked is the effect of wildfires on mental health outcomes. Wildfires and poor mental health outcomes share similar geospatial and seasonal patterns. Fires are also traumatic events to those nearby and indirectly influence many of the factors that affect mental health, including climate, illness and disease. In this paper, we quantify the relationship between wildfires – specifically, proximity to fire events and exposure to smoke – and the most extreme mental health outcome: suicide. We run a fixed effects regression that models county level suicide rate as a function of proximity to the closest wildfire and PM2.5 exposure from fires, incorporating lags to measure effect over time and a vector of meteorological controls that may effect both wildfires and suicide. Despite the trove of anecdotal evidence and speculation connecting wildfires with suicide, we find that proximity to fires and PM2.5 exposure from wildfire exhibit no effect on suicides rates.

Subject	Wildfire, Mental Health, PM2.5, Climate Change.
Genre	Text
Genre	Thesis

DOI	https://doi.org/10.25740/bv695xj5128
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/bv695xj5128

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC).

Preferred citation: Parell, J. (2023). Burned: Measuring the Effects of Wildfires on Suicide. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/bv695xj5128. https://doi.org/10.25740/bv695xj5128.

Stanford University, Department of Economics, Honors Theses

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