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. Despite a growing interest in the effects of the physical environment on human behavior, researchers have generally neglected to study the impact of meteorological variables on psychological adjustment (Campbell & Beets, 1977). The sparse literature that does