
NearlyIrrelevantCake
The Cake Is A Lie
- Aug 12, 2021
- 1,728
Salmon Arm had been blanketed in wildfire smoke for days. A record heat dome had killed nearly 600 people across the province only weeks earlier.
When the town of Lytton, B.C., set a Canadian temperature record of 49.6 C — a day later burning to the ground — the evacuees added to the steady stream of patients at the Shuswap Lake General Hospital.
Emergency room doctor Lori Adamson remembers stretchers lined up in the hallway. The number of patients suffering heat illness and smoke inhalation meant her unit was running out of available beds and nurses.
Then came the suicides.
"A lot of the youth that I was seeing were attempting to commit suicide because of climate distress," she told Glacier Media.
"They're fearing that they'll never outlive the climate disasters and global warming… they overtly expressed that."
Adamson says at least three young patients she saw tried to end their life through a drug overdose because they feared climate change.