30, 2021, he was found with an internal body temperature of 108 degrees. There was John Bernal Jr., a 49-year-old man whose family worked hard to get him into a group home, only to have him wander away. Data from the public health department shows that when factoring in other serious mental illnesses - such as schizoaffective disorder or bipolar disorder - the numbers are likely to be much higher.ĭeath records and interviews with medical practitioners and family members reveal how acutely vulnerable people with schizophrenia are. In 2022, the year Stephan stumbled down the South Phoenix street, people diagnosed with schizophrenia made up 4 percent of all heat-related deaths and 4 percent of all hospital visits for heat-related illness, according to the medical examiner’s office and the public health department of Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix and its suburbs. “People with schizophrenia have more difficulty thermoregulating,” said Joshua Wortzel, a psychiatrist at Brown University. There is also evidence that these patients have inherent difficulty dealing with temperature changes. Drugs prescribed for schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses dehydrate patients and make it harder for their bodies to manage high temperatures.
People with schizophrenia are more likely to be unhoused or economically vulnerable - but that’s not the only reason they are at greater risk. In people with schizophrenia, it was over 200 percent. Michael Lee, an epidemiologist at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control and one of the study’s authors, said people with chronic kidney disease were 36 percent more likely to die during the heat wave than in normal conditions. When temperatures surge, the effects of schizophrenia can be profound.ĭuring the record-breaking heat wave in British Columbia in Canada in 2021, for example, researchers found that an astonishing 8 percent of the people who died in the heat had been diagnosed with schizophrenia - rendering it more dangerous, when combined with heat, than any other condition studied. But schizophrenia, a mental illness affecting less than 1 percent of Americans, has become a major risk factor, especially in hot places like Phoenix. Health experts have focused on the danger rising temperatures pose to the elderly or those with heart disease.
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