“Unusually hot days have profound effects on mental health and human physiology.”

“surfer cools off during a heat wave in southern California in October 2017. MIKE BLAKE / REUTERS”

by Robinson Meyer

“For almost two centuries now, scientists have noticed a place’s suicide rate bears troubling links to the changing of the seasons and the friendliness of its climate.

“In 1881, the Italian physician Enrico Morselli noted that suicide rates peak in the summer, deeming the effect “too great for it to be attributed to chance of the human will.” Two decades later, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim noticed the same effect—though he also found the suicide rate was higher in Scandinavian countries.

“Even today, CDC data confirms that suicides peak in the United States in the early summer.”

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