“The city of Phoenix’s 27-page heat response plan doesn’t include any mentions of mental illness or schizophrenia — despite the fact that David Hondula, the city’s director of heat response, co-authored a paper showing that heat is boosting hospital admissions of people with schizophrenia in the Phoenix area…
“For almost a century, scientists have known that people with schizophrenia struggle to regulate their body temperatures. In the 1930s, two doctors in Worcester, Mass., placed people with and without schizophrenia in a small, windowless room with eight electric heaters. Under hot conditions, the researchers noted, the patients with schizophrenia’s body temperatures rose farther and faster than the control group. ‘Schizophrenic subjects,” they wrote later, “are unable to comply normally … with the regulation of heat.’
“The precise reasons why people with serious mental illnesses — and those with schizophrenia in particular — struggle to deal with higher temperatures remain somewhat murky. Some doctors hypothesize that schizophrenia affects the hypothalamus, the brain’s inner thermostat. Schizophrenia has also been linked to problems regulating dopamine, the chemical that makes the body feel good; altered levels of dopamine can also prevent the body from effectively cooling itself off…
“Under psychosis, a patient might walk for miles engaging only with the voices and characters in their own mind. Under normal conditions, that might simply be dangerous. In Phoenix, it’s deadly.”
A 1% that needs protection from extreme heat.
Homeless struggle to stay safe from record high temperatures in blistering Phoenix – AP