Crisis support-seeking behavior and temperature in the United States: Is there an association in young adults and adolescents?

Abstract

Background: Mounting evidence demonstrates the relationship between high temperatures and adverse mental health outcomes. Yet, no study has examined the influence of temperature on crisis support-seeking behavior among youth in large urban areas.

Methods: Crisis Text Line (CTL) is a text messaging service that provides crisis interventions for support-seeking individuals for a range of mental-health outcomes in the United States. We applied a distributed lag non-linear modeling technique to assess the short-term impacts of daily maximum and minimum temperature on crisis-related events in four metropolitan locations in the USA.

Results: There were multiple positive associations in three of the four study locations that demonstrate crisis help-seeking behavior increased during anomalously warm conditions.

Conclusions: This study suggests that there is a significant association between high minimum or maximum temperatures and crisis help-seeking behaviors in young adults and adolescents in urban areas in the United States.

Keywords: Adolescents; Ambient temperature; Crisis Text Line; Crisis events; Extreme heat; Mental health.