Eco-anxiety and Suicide

Suicide is a major public health problem. About 9,000 suicides per year are retrieved by year in France. Between 15,000 and 20,0000 suicide attempts give rise to contact with the healthcare system. Among young people aged 15 to 24 years old, suicide is the second main cause of death. In this way, suicide among adolescents is a major public health priority, due to its seriousness, its frequency, and its potentially preventable nature. The severity of suicide risk can be assessed by different scales, and the Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS) is the most widely used in the international literature for adolescents, assessing four dimensions: suicidal ideation, severity of ideation, suicidal behavior and lethality. The measurement of the seriousness of the suicide risk is therefore defined as the measurement of the importance of the direct and indirect negative consequences associated with this risk. It can be catch up in the four factors mentioned above. Anxiety is one of the central pillars influencing the suicidal risk of adolescents. Very few studies have identified operationalizable and generalizable risk factors for anxiety. However, in adolescents, one of the risk factors for anxiety seems particularly important, because it is a factor that is both generic (i.e., it can be found in different profiles of adolescents), related to the projection in the future (which characterizes this population), and relatively specific to this age group, while being operational through validated questionnaires. This important risk factor is the eco-anxiety, which corresponds to anxiety related to climate change. The theme of climate change is certainly a central social issue, but also an important public health issue. First, climate change raises direct risks to human health, and indirectly some risks for mental health. For instance, the direct consequences of a drought or natural disaster can cause material hardship that impacts indirectly mental health (Thoma et