Alongside these physical health impacts, floods cause mental health challenges that often last considerably longer than the physical aftermath of the flooding. One study showed that flood victims were 4 to 8.7 times more likely to experience mental health problems than those who had not experienced flooding.9 Anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, insomnia, and psychosis are commonly reported, primarily amongst the most vulnerable, such as children and those dependent on others’ for their responses to the floods.9,10 

Perhaps the most significant feature of these disasters is how unevenly their impacts are distributed. Urban poverty forces many people to live in areas that are more susceptible to natural disasters. For example, Carías et al. (2022)'s study found that urban poor populations experience measurably worse and more prolonged health outcomes after flooding than wealthier urban populations, who show comparatively little effect at all.11 This pattern is not unique to Indonesia. In South Africa’s Western Cape, it was precisely these communities, informal settlements with inadequate drainage, temporary roofing, and limited access to emergency services, that bore the brunt of the May 2026 storm.12

On the ground, the response to these May 2026 storms has been immediate and commendable. Gift of the Givers, South Africa's largest disaster response organisation, distributed hot meals and blankets across informal settlements; hospitals and clinics operated under contingency arrangements, and emergency services fielded hundreds of calls. These interventions, vital as they are, address what is visible. What is far less accounted for, whether in government disaster response, humanitarian efforts, or community-led recovery, is what comes after: the mental health toll, the long-term morbidities, and the compounding effect on communities that were already under-resourced before the first raindrop fell. This is a significant gap, and one that merits closer examination in its own right. 

Together, the global cases discussed point to a consistent imbalance in addressing the invisible impacts of extreme flooding: disaster response continues to measure severity primarily by what can be seen and counted in the immediate term (deaths, damaged homes, disrupted infrastructure) while the slower, less visible toll on physical and mental health goes largely undocumented and unaddressed. This is not a shortfall unique to any one country or storm; it recurs wherever disaster planning treats health as secondary to physical reconstruction, and it falls hardest on those with the fewest resources to recover.