Protester holds up an anti-Rick Snyder sign regarding the Flint water crisis at a 2017 Climate March. Credit: Edward Kimmel from Takoma Park, MD
Key Points:
- Five years into the Flint water crisis, 1 in 5 adults were estimated to have clinical depression.
- One in four adults were estimated to have PTSD.
- The mental health burden was larger for those who experienced prior physical or sexual assault—over 3x more likely to have depression, over 6x more likely to have PTSD.
On April 25, 2014, the city of Flint switched its water supply from Lake Huron and the Detroit River to the Flint River and failed to properly treat the water supply to prevent lead and other elements from leaching out of the city’s old water pipes. Virtually all Flint residents were consequently exposed to drinking water with unsafe levels of bacteria, disinfection byproducts, and lead.
It took five years for Flint drinking water to finally be declared lead-free. Now, data from the largest mental health survey of the Flint, Michigan community are revealing the non-physical effects of those five years.
According to a new study, 1 in 5 adults, or roughly 13,600 people, were estimated to have clinical depression, and 1 in 4, or 15,000 people, were estimated to have PTSD five years after the water crisis began.
“The mental health burden of America’s largest public-works environmental disaster clearly continues for many adults in Flint,” said Aaron Reuben, a postdoctoral scholar at Duke University who led the research, which was published in JAMA Network Open.
According to senior author Dean Kilpatrick, professor at Medical University of South Carolina, past years’ rates of depression and PTSD identified in Flint are three to five times greater than national estimates among U.S. adults overall, and likely the result of a combination of higher base rates of mental health problems in Flint before the crisis as well as significant exacerbation of problems resulting from the crisis.
Particularly striking was the finding that those with prior physical or sexual assault were more than three times more likely to have depression and more than six times more likely to have PTSD than those without this history. Study findings suggest that more should be done to provide mental health treatment for residents of Flint.
“There is a clear unmet need,” said Reuben. “Nearly 100% of surveyed Flint residents reported that they changed their behavior to avoid consuming contaminated water during the crisis, and the vast majority still worry that the exposures they had may cause future health problems for themselves or their family members.”
Information provided by Duke.