Climate change affecting mental health in Northern Labrador

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

This high quality 10 minute video explores concepts of climate vulnerability to livelihoods, mental health, and agency of Indigenous Inuit people in northern Labrador, Canada through interviews with community leaders.

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Notes from our reviewers

The CLEAN collection is hand-picked and rigorously reviewed for scientific accuracy and classroom effectiveness. Read what our review team had to say about this resource below or learn more about how CLEAN reviews teaching materials.

Consider using this video to start a conversation about climate vulnerability and emotions in the classroom and invite students to describe how climate change has impacted their mental health and how one's location (geographic, identity) shape how climate change affects mental health.
The video shows Inuit perspectives on how changing ice and weather conditions (shortening of hunting season) impact the daily life and mental health conditions of people whose lives depend on hunting. The video shows a researcher who asked local people about how climate change affected their mental health and emotions. The researcher found that the land is foundational to mental health. Importantly, it shows not only how people are affected, but how they are taking action through traditional sewing, snow shoe making, and sharing environmental observations and feelings on an app to relieve stress and avoid substance abuse. This would be a great video resource to show when discussing livelihood and emotional impacts of climate change and how people manage those impacts. Mental health and emotional impacts of climate change are becoming more commonly discussed, but are still relatively uncommon. Passed initial science review - expert science review pending.
This video is produced by CBC, a public news broadcasting agency and the equivalent of NPR in Canada. The content is unbiased and covers research being conducted. There is no educators guide, however instructors can facilitate a class discussion using the same questions that the interviewer uses in the video.