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.
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