The Overlooked Mental Toll of Wildfires
- abbygagnon1
- Dec 10, 2025
- 2 min read
Media outlets and newspapers recount the horrors of the wildfires in California. Climate change has been causing temperatures to skyrocket and forests to become extremely dried out. Statistics pop up regarding the number of lives lost or the amount of forest that was destroyed. It all feels so distant, almost detached. What’s it like to live through such a terrifying, apocalyptic ordeal?
Well, you can’t quite put trauma into a quantifiable statistic.
Trauma can compound over time, eating away at an individual’s mental well-being until nothing remains. Also, everyone has a different capacity for how much emotional weight they can carry upon their shoulders before reaching their breaking point.
There is not much research on the long-term physical effects of wildfire smoke. And for mental health, almost nothing. Most studies only track the short-term effects of natural disasters.
Irva Hertz-Picciotto, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Davis set out to make headway in correlation between wildfires and their toll on mental health. She sought out approval to create a study on the mental and physical effects of wildfires. Hertz-Picciotto received over $300,000 in grant money to fund a study called WHAT NOW. She released an online survey in which survivors were asked about their physical and mental health following the traumatic events they experienced. From the responses, Hertz-Picciotto and her team were able to figure out what pathways they could explore for determining the collective long-term effects. One third of the survivors reported anxiety, stress, insomnia, and chronic nightmares. A lot of the participants reported symptoms of PTSD that were triggered by things in their everyday lives.
The true issue lies within the resources of specific communities in which a devastating wildfire has occurred. The funding for programs that tailor to fire survivors is critically low and overlooked.
This isn’t the only scenario in which the structure of funding has been an issue. Survivors are provided with immediate care, short-term support from disaster relief organizations, and then are expected to “get over it.”
Hertz-Picciotto says that “research on other types of natural disasters can persist a decade after an event.” The key to maintaining mental health is continued support and resources. However, as wildfires become more frequent, the capability to fulfill that goal becomes impossible under the limited funding.
Another problem persists that plagues the recovery process: Inequity.
Those with more financial means are able to pay for private therapy following a traumatic event such as a wildfire. Wealthier people also may live a less-stressful lifestyle that is not paired with financial burden unlike a large number of people.
Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has narrowed down people’s evacuation options drastically. In-person support for mental recovery has been diminished by social distancing guidelines.
This topic caught my eye because of my passion for mental health and my unfamiliarity with wildfires. Due to living on the East Coast, I have never experienced the trauma of widespread wildfires, but I know people who have. The research that I have done for this post opened my eyes to long-lasting effects that I had never realized existed.
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