Summer in the city: Urban weather conditions and psychiatric emergency-room visits.

Abstract

The relationship between psychiatric emergency-room visits and meteorological variables was examined for the summer months across 2 consecutive years. Weather involving low barometric pressure and high cloud cover was significantly related to emergency-room visits for depression, and air pollution was correlated with schizophrenia and total visits. Whereas several studies have linked barometric changes to depression, no previous studies have examined or reported a link between air pollution and psychopathology. Data for this study were collected while John Briere was an intern in clinical psychology at the University of California, Davis, Medical School. Anthony Downes is no longer at the University of Manitoba.

Weather and emotional state: a search for associations between weather and calls to telephone counseling services

“…Low barometric pressure has been associated with increases in suicides and hospital psychiatric admissions (Sanborn et al 1970) and depression diagnoses (Briere et al 1983), while riots, certain types of crime, and calls for police service have been found to increase with temperature (Baron and Ransberger 1978;Carlsmith and Anderson 1979;Feldman and Jarmon 1979;Harries and Stadler 1983;Rotton and Frey 1985).…”

Layoffs and violence revisited

“…), our dependent variable would seem to have advantages in ecological and external validity. While other investigators have used psychiatric emergencies as an outcome measure of the effects of environmental variables [e.g., Briere et al, 1983;Rotton and Frey, 1984], we used coerced treatment because it is a matter of greater consequence than hospital visits or calls to police for assistance. Moreover, we analyzed our criterion measure, civil commitment for danger to others, by controlling for grave disability commitments in the same data set so as to lend credence to that criterion as an aggression index.…”

“…Civil commitments are not the same as "psychiatric emergencies" studied in other research on the effects of environmental variables, weather and pollution [Briere et al, 1983;Rotton and Fry, 1984], for example, on mental health. These psychiatric emergency variables are typically counts of emergency department visits or calls to police departments for assistance.…”

Metereological conditions and psychiatric emergency visits in Messina, Italy

“…The literature suggests that there is a surprisingly direct relationship between weather conditions and a variety of disordered behaviors (Christensen et al, 2008;Yacherson et al, 2011;North et al, 1998). Moreover, meteorological conditions have been linked psychiatric admission rates (Briere & Downes, 1983;Daniels et al, 2000).…”