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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

#41

Post by malandrew »

challenger22 wrote: post #3

>In fact, the Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health estimates that city dwellers face a nearly 40 percent higher risk of depression, 20 percent higher chance of anxiety, and double the risk of schizophrenia than people living in rural areas. >In their review, Meyer-Lindenberg and van den Bosch found that some potential threats had been examined more thoroughly than others. For some, including pollen, there wasn’t…

How do we know what is cause and effect? What if cities naturally happen to attract people at a higher risk of depression, anxiety and schizophrenia?

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

#42

Post by brokenkebab »

challenger22 wrote: post #30
username444 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of upward mobility in rural areas is much more damaging in the long term, mentally, than living in the city.

What evidence do you have for this claim? The article just laid down a lot of evidence that contradicts what you say.

But the article didn't lay down a lot of evidence: there's an observation by two sociologists limited by frames of Chicago's soul asylum in 1930s, and vague estimation of some Urban Design whatever, and finally a paper by a mental health researcher who essentially tells it's an emerging field, and more research needed.

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

#43

Post by jmchuster »

deathanatos wrote: post #20
lr4444lr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in Copenhagen 4 years ago, cars were pretty plentiful. (Not so much street parking.) I read that car ownership there is about 30%. Where were you thinking of?

As an American, outside of NYC and maybe Boston, 30% car ownership sounds incredibly low to me. I'm in SF, and while I know some who don't, the overwhelming majority of people that I know own a car. I take public transit daily — and I need a car to get to it.

Quick search indicates nowhere in the US is close to 30% car ownership, with NY coming at the lowest at 45% car ownership.

    New York, NY        45.6%
    Newark, NJ          59.7%
    Washington, DC      62.9%
    Jersey City, NJ     62.9%
    Cambridge, MA       63.2%
    Boston, MA          66.2%
    Paterson, NJ        67.0%
    Hartford, CT        67.4%
    San Francisco, CA   70.1%

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

#44

Post by magduf »

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 around in.

I don't know where people get this idea that rural America is some kind of idyllic, serene place. It really isn't, for the most part. If you want idyllic, you'll have to find some extremely remote place in the mountains of the western states.

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

#45

Post by magduf »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #34
jackcosgrove wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not direct evidence, but people continue to move away from rural areas and into cities all over the world, to better themselves.

People will do all sorts of things that aren't good for their mental and/or physical health in order to make a decent living. I would wager that the overwhelming majority of people moving from rural to urban areas are doing it to better their bank accounts.

It's not to "better their bank accounts", it's to survive, because people need jobs to make money, and money to survive. Modern people can't support themselves on rural land any more, and even 100+ years ago ones who tried had short and unhappy lives (remember sharecropping?). There aren't enough jobs in rural areas to support the people there, so they leave.

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

#46

Post by zaroth »

Not to be overly melodramatic or sardonic but life is damaging to mental health, urban, rural, or otherwise. And not just modern life, but rather it is, I believe, our human condition.

Too many of the people I meet are ground down, sliding by, holding on, grappling with their identity and place in the world, somewhere on the scale of mildly scarred to full blown post traumatic, anxiety ridden, and/or profoundly lost.

Religion has abjectly failed humanity as a primary means for grappling with and managing the crushing gears of life. The idea that our non-denominational “community” is supposed to fill in the gap is laughable. The dream that the Internet would somehow fill that role at scale has proven in many cases to do just the opposite.

It’s not that humanity is lost or without hope, but we destroy ourselves (and our planet) in the way we live, and I doubt strongly that our genetic predisposition / survival instincts will ever allow us to reach any form of widespread enlightenment.

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

#47

Post by magduf »

thrower123 wrote: post #24
klipt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80% of Americans live in cities. That means if they all moved to rural areas, the population density of rural areas would go up 5X. Would they still be rural then?

That's actually a good question... There is so much land, especially west of the Mississippi, that is almost completely unpeopled that I'm not sure that distributing the people concentrated in the most dense 1000 sq miles would make a significant increase. We need a Randall Monroe What If?

Much of the land west of the Mississippi isn't arable land or livable in any way, unless you do what they did in Phoenix and pump the rivers dry. That isn't sustainable; it's an environmental disaster.

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

#48

Post by dsfyu404ed »

magduf wrote: post #45
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will do all sorts of things that aren't good for their mental and/or physical health in order to make a decent living. I would wager that the overwhelming majority of people moving from rural to urban areas are doing it to better their bank accounts.

It's not to "better their bank accounts", it's to survive, because people need jobs to make money, and money to survive. Modern people can't support themselves on rural land any more, and even 100+ years ago ones who tried had short and unhappy lives (remember sharecropping?). There aren't enough jobs in rural areas to support the people there, so they leave.

You can totally live somewhere rural and support yourself and a family. There's just less opportunity to make easy money there so it will be harder.

If your optimizing for least effort for a given income level moving to the city is a no-brainer since it's where all the easy money is.

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

#49

Post by magduf »

jmchuster wrote: post #43
deathanatos wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American, outside of NYC and maybe Boston, 30% car ownership sounds incredibly low to me. I'm in SF, and while I know some who don't, the overwhelming majority of people that I know own a car. I take public transit daily — and I need a car to get to it.

Quick search indicates nowhere in the US is close to 30% car ownership, with NY coming at the lowest at 45% car ownership. New York, NY 45.6% Newark, NJ 59.7% Washington, DC 62.9% Jersey City, NJ 62.9% Cambridge, MA 63.2% Boston, MA 66.2% Paterson, NJ 67.0% Hartford, CT 67.4% San Francisco, CA 70.1%

NYC is a very large city, that really would make more sense being separated from NY state and turned into a separate city-state.

Manhattan alone is larger than many other cities, and it's only one "borough" in the city. If you look at Manhattan by itself, I'm sure you'll see very different numbers on car ownership. It's the people in Bronx, Queens, etc. that skew the numbers.

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

#50

Post by semafour »

jweir wrote: post #11
maxsilver wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why electric cars are so important. No exhaust, no noise. They're perfect for urban use.

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.

In some states, suburban and rural folks find out they like concentrated areas made for people, not cars, once every year. They love the state fair.
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