Housing Displacement, Employment Disruption, and Mental Health After the 2023 Maui Wildfires

As climate-related disasters escalate in frequency and intensity, their mental health implications represent an urgent yet underquantified dimension of global health. Extreme events, including wildfires, hurricanes, and floods, are consistently associated with elevated rates of depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, and suicidality, particularly among individuals with direct exposure or preexisting social vulnerabilities. However, most existing evidence relies on cross-sectional designs, convenience samples, or administrative records that may undercapture undiagnosed psychological distress—especially in rural and underserved populations with limited access to care. These methodological limitations restrict robust inference and obscure the true burden of disaster-related mental illness. Despite increasing global attention to this issue, population-based studies using rigorous analytic frameworks to evaluate disaster-related mental health in high-risk, structurally vulnerable US communities remain exceedingly rare.