Increased Risk of Depression for People Living in Coal Mining Areas of Central Appalachia: Calculating the Psychological Costs of Mountaintop Removal

When I ran across this study this morning, I thought, “Well, duh. You needed a scientific study to find this out?” Michael Hendryx, who is at the School of Public Health at Indiana University but spearheaded research into the health effects that mountaintop removal while he was at West Virginia University, and Kestral A. Innes-Wimsatt, a researcher at WVU, looked into the prevalence of depression among those who live among the holocaust of mountaintop mining. Big surprise, removing the mountains for the coal inside leaves folks depressed.

            Overall, around seven percent of the U.S. population suffers some form of depression. Hendryx and Innes-Wimsatt found that around 10 percent of residents in the coalfields of Appalachia suffer from depression and that around 17 percent of folks who live around mountaintop mines have some form of depression. Even after adjusting for other factors that might affect a person’s susceptibility to depression, such as race and poverty, Hendryx and Innes-Wimsatt still found that mountaintop removal coal mining affected the mental well being of the people who live around the mines. From their research the authors conclude:

The odds of a score indicative of risk for major depression were 40% higher in MTR areas compared to non- mining areas after statistical adjustment for other risks. After control for covariates, the risk of major depression was statistically elevated only in the MTR areas and not in the areas where other forms of mining were practiced, compared to the non-mining referent.

Increased Risk of Depression for People Living in Coal Mining Areas of Central Appalachia was published in the online peer-reviewed journal Ecopsychology.  Explaining their findings, the authors suggest that the mountaintop removal depression might be due to solistalgia, a condition of distress during periods of environmental change. This distress is most acute for people who feel particular connections to their environments, as many folks in Appalachia, who can trace their ancestors back for generations, feel.

            Some of the factors associated with depression, such as obesity, binge drinking, smoking, and poverty were adjusted for in this research. In the real world it is difficult to actually separate all this from mountaintop removal. As mountaintop removal reduces the amount of jobs and the economic well being of a community, people feel abandoned by friends and family as they move away. They also feel trapped into an economic system that offers them little chance for secure employment. All of these things depress people, and all of them are caused by mountaintop removal. What I’m suggesting here is that the scientific controls that Hendryx and Innes-Wimsatt imposed on their research, which researchers have to do to maintain scientific integrity, actually winds up underestimating the amount of mental distress caused by the mountaintop mines.

A cemetery left amid the destruction of mountaintop removal. Would you feel good living around this?