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City residents live with mental illness at higher rates than general population

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Re: City residents live with mental illness at higher rates than general population

#111

Post by seisvelas »

jackcosgrove wrote: post #21

Every time I visit my relatives in their rural area, I feel a sense of liberation. The air is cleaner, there is less noise, you can hear the breeze, and even the sky seems bigger. You can see the Milky Way at night. Coming from a city, it's a relief. However I also know the dark side of rural areas, mainly substance abuse triggered by boredom and lack of opportunity. There is always a trade-off.

All the cities I've lived in also have pretty significant substance abuse problems. According to this article,

https://drugabuse.com/country-vs-city-addictions-differ-says...

Rural people are more likely to abuse alcohol, whereas city dwellers are more likely to abuse hard drugs.

Re: City residents live with mental illness at higher rates than general population

#112

Post by CalRobert »

CompanionCuuube wrote: post #98
jweir wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are a sign of urban failure. If your city needs cars your city has failed. Go spend some time a city without cars - or sections of a city that don’t allow cars - I’ll wager you like it. Unfortunately in the US many criticize such efforts as being like Disneyland - as if that is a bad a thing.

Do you guarantee that the legal items one would normally transport in a car will be allowed on public transportation?

I think most people agree there is _some_ use for automobiles in cities, just like there's _some_ use for helicopters in cities. It's _extremely_ limited though.

I actually think it's silly to allow guns in cars and not on public transport (way more drive-bys than bus-bys, after all) but that's definitely an edge case.

Re: City residents live with mental illness at higher rates than general population

#113

Post by woodpanel »

I wonder how much we're misjudging cause and effect:

If I'm suffering from mental illness, I'd be more inclined to seek the anonymousness of a city, rather than the exposure of a small town/village

(In my experience the same is one of the reasons why homeless tend to move to bigger cities and/or why most of a city's homeless population is made up from people who weren't born there).

Re: City residents live with mental illness at higher rates than general population

#115

Post by jtms »

magduf wrote: post #77
camjohnson26 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I smell more sewage in the city I live in than cow manure or pig farms visiting the rural areas.

Do you live in NYC? That city really does stink. However, I just spent 2 weeks in Japanese cities, including almost a week in Tokyo, and it was extremely clean. Even on trash day it didn't stink.

NYC is a variable bouquet of odors varying on the scale of “best thing you’d have ever smelled in life” to “omg did something die and crawl up my nose” all within the span of a single block. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Re: City residents live with mental illness at higher rates than general population

#116

Post by seanmcdirmid »

magduf wrote: post #44
jackcosgrove wrote: post #21

Every time I visit my relatives in their rural area, I feel a sense of liberation. The air is cleaner, there is less noise, you can hear the breeze, and even the sky seems bigger. You can see the Milky Way at night. Coming from a city, it's a relief. However I also know the dark side of rural areas, mainly substance abuse triggered by boredom and lack of opportunity. There is always a trade-off.

That's not my experience with rural areas at all. Instead, it's usually pretty noisy because of all the neighbors with barking dogs (yes, there are neighbors in rural areas; most people can't afford 40 acres all to themselves, so they live in little clusters), and it stinks because of the cow and horse manure. Just hope you're not located close to a pig farm. And of course there's all the noisy trucks everyone drives…

I remember waking up in boracay and Ubud to thousands of farm animals chattering (lots of chickens, cows, etc...). It’s kind of a surreal SE Asia experience.

Re: City residents live with mental illness at higher rates than general population

#117

Post by dpeck »

magduf wrote: post #75
logjammin wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a weird fetishization, isn't it? I think that's a really good point. Dovetails with political movements that idealize(d) the working man/class, as if poor people couldn't be as flawed and human as the rest of us. It's pretty bold to be talking about cities and mental health when about five minutes in a small town will vividly show you the backstabbing, gossipy, popularity contest bullshit that comes with "closel…

You bring up another thing: small towns are not actually "rural". Rural is when you literally cannot walk to a store in less than an hour to get food. Small towns really aren't that different from cities, just at a smaller scale. Things are still close together (in fact, usually they're more dense than suburbs) and walkable, if the town was laid out before the rise of the automobile. Of course, they have big downside…

Its interesting how many people mistake those for being the same. I grew up in a rural area and often at social events people will introduce me to their friends who grew up in small towns assuming we'd have a lot to talk about.

From many of these conversations over the years I don't think the experience growing up could have been more different.

Re: City residents live with mental illness at higher rates than general population

#118

Post by carlosyasu91 »

CalRobert wrote: post #2

Cities are great, if you build them for people, and not cars. We don't do this anymore (outside a few exemplar places like Denmark, NL, etc.), sadly.

Fully agree with you, having been in Stuttgart, Germany for a Summer it was great to be able to get anywhere in public transportation

Re: City residents live with mental illness at higher rates than general population

#119

Post by psychomugs »

magduf wrote: post #77
camjohnson26 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I smell more sewage in the city I live in than cow manure or pig farms visiting the rural areas.

Do you live in NYC? That city really does stink. However, I just spent 2 weeks in Japanese cities, including almost a week in Tokyo, and it was extremely clean. Even on trash day it didn't stink.

I live in Tokyo, and you'll get the occasional strong whiff of sewage that's worse than anything I've ever smelled in NYC. There are also quite a few public bathrooms that don't have hand soap and some of them you'd be better off not using. I think that the Japanese discipline to not litter coupled with the overstaffed garbage disposal workforce is what keeps the city clean, at least visually.

Re: City residents live with mental illness at higher rates than general population

#120

Post by toomanybeersies »

zaroth wrote: post #78
z9e wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with most of this, but I think your observation on religion is exaggerated. It's a very personal thing and I think it still helps a lot of people cope, regardless of how un-cool it is these days.

In the big picture, with amount of killing that has been done in the name of religion over millennia, I just find it hard to reconcile.

If not religion, then something else. Whether it's ethnic violence, like the Rwandan genocide or the Balkans; political violence, like the Vietnam war or the Great Leap Forward in China (plus the Chinese civil war); for money, such as the Belgians in the Congo.
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