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The Impact of Drought on Mental Health in Rural and Regional Australia

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Abstract

While the economic and environmental impacts of drought have been widely studied, there are few large-scale studies that have examined the impact of drought on mental health. This paper is one of the first to provide estimates of the impact of drought on mental health using a large-scale representative survey. The analysis is based upon a 2007 survey of 8,000 people living in rural and regional areas of Australia. At the time the survey was conducted a substantial part of the Australian continent was experiencing severe drought. The impacts of drought are estimated using regression models which allow for the effects of demographic and geographic variables to be held constant. A novel feature of this paper is that the impact of drought on the mental health is estimated separately for a range of people in rural areas—including non-farmers as well as farmers and farm workers. The paper finds that drought does have negative mental health impacts and that those who are most impacted upon are farmers and farm workers. There do not appear to be substantial flow-on effects of drought on the mental health of those employed outside of agriculture. There is evidence that the more severe the agricultural impact of drought the greater the impact on mental health. Farmers who reported that the drought had eliminated or reduced their farm’s productivity to the lowest point ever had significantly higher rates of mental health problems and lower mental health wellbeing scores than those who did not report they were in drought or reported that the drought had little or no effect. The findings are notable given that recent climate change scenarios suggest that the frequency and severity of drought will increase in many countries.

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Notes

  1. For the purposes of survey design, drought status is based upon rainfall deficiency in the 3 years before April 2007, with severe drought being areas with rainfall in the lowest 0–5th percentile compared to the long-term average, drought being in the lowest 6–10th percentile of rainfall, below-average rainfall being in the 11–49th percentile and above-average rainfall being in the 50–100th percentile. Rainfall over the preceding 3-years is used because this is the longest reference period for which the Bureau of Meteorology will provide historical rainfall deficiency data. A priori, the 3-year-period was preferred because rainfall deficiency over a longer period is likely to lead to economic and social stress in households that are significantly dependent on the local agricultural economy. The rainfall data is for Statistical Local Areas.

  2. Further details about the design and conduct of the RRFS are provided in Edwards et al. (2009) and were approved by the Australian Institute of Family Studies Ethics Committee.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the referees for valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CAEPR, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, Acton, ACT, 0200, Australia

    Matthew Gray & Boyd Hunter

  2. Australian Institute of Family Studies, 20/485 La Trobe Street, Melbourne, VIC, 3000, Australia

    Ben Edwards

Authors
  1. Ben Edwards
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  2. Matthew Gray
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  3. Boyd Hunter
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Matthew Gray.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9.

Table 5 The effect of drought on mental health problems, logistic regression
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Table 6 The effect of drought on mental health problems (including interactions with employment status), logistic regression
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Table 7 The effect of drought on mental health wellbeing score (including interactions with employment status), Ordinary Least Squares
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Table 8 Drought severity and the mental health problems of farmers, Logistic regression
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Table 9 Drought severity and the mental health wellbeing score of farmers
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Edwards, B., Gray, M. & Hunter, B. The Impact of Drought on Mental Health in Rural and Regional Australia. Soc Indic Res 121, 177–194 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-014-0638-2

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