Angry, Scared, and Unsure: Mental Health Consequences of Contaminated Water in Flint, Michigan

Abstract

Natural and manmade crises impact community-level behavioral health, including mental health and substance use. This article shares findings from a larger project about community behavioral health, relevant to the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan, using data from a larger study, involving monthly surveys of a panel of key informants from Genesee County. The data come from open-response questions and are analyzed as qualitative data using grounded theory techniques. Although respondents were not asked about the water issues in Flint, participants commented that the water situation was increasing stress, anxiety, and depression among the city’s population. Participants thought these mental health issues would affect the entire community but would be worse among low-income, African American populations in the city. Mental health consequences were related not only to the water contamination but to distrust of public officials who are expected and have the authority to resolve the issues. The mental health effects of this public health crisis are significant and have received inadequate attention in the literature. Public health response to situations similar to the water issues in Flint should include sustained attention mental health.

Ecological Disasters and Mental Health: Causes, Consequences, and Interventions

“…These and other factors create a disaster ecology in which various forces of harm impact individuals, communities, and societies (3). For example, cultural and contextual factors were critical to community partnership and effective response in: 1) Haiti earthquake in 2010 required knowledge about and incorporation of voodoo as a religious ritual integral to how citizens conceptualized and responded to healthcare interventions (4), 2) West Africa Ebola virus outbreak in 2000 necessitated awareness and collaboration with local communities to incorporate the importance of faith-based burial rituals (5), 3) Flint, Michigan lead water crisis in 2015 was experienced by community members as further evidence of systemic racial inequities that further eroded public trust (6). Each of these events, as with all disasters, necessitated an understanding of sociocultural and contextual factors within the communities to optimize response and recovery efforts.…”

Study of the Water Quality of a Tropical Reservoir

“…Thus, variations in pH, salinity, and the properties of the redox potential can cause the mobilization and resuspension of chemical particles accumulated in the sediments, magnifying even its toxic effect, such as the case of heavy metals. Heavy metals are largely derived from anthropogenic sources, such as domestic, agricultural, and industrial waste, and constitute a danger to aquatic biota and human beings, as well representing an environmental deterioration factor [7].…”

Racial Capitalism: A Fundamental Cause of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic Inequities in the United States

“…this devaluation is based on both their blackness and their surplus status, with the two being mutually constituted. (p. 1) Additional research has found that exposure to the Flint water crisis has been linked to both physical (Sadler et al, 922942H EBXXX10.1177 1 University of California Merced, Merced, CA, USA 2017) and mental (Cuthbertson et al, 2016) health problems for poor and people of color and can be explained through multiple mechanisms, such as disinvested, racially segregated neighborhoods (Michigan Civil Rights Commission 2017).…”