During the record-breaking heat wave in British Columbia in Canada in 2021, for example, researchers found that an astonishing eight 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. 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. In people with schizophrenia, it was over 200 percent.
People with schizophrenia are more likely to be unhoused or economically vulnerable — but that’s not the only reason they are at greater risk. Drugs prescribed for schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses dehydrate patients and make it harder for their bodies to manage high temperatures. There is also evidence that these patients have inherent difficulty dealing with temperature changes. “People with schizophrenia have more difficulty thermoregulating,” said Joshua Wortzel, a psychiatrist at Brown University.
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