
City residents live with mental illness at higher rates than general population - mimixco
https://www.popsci.com/physical-surroundings-cities-mental-illness
======
jackcosgrove
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.

~~~
magduf
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.

~~~
crx07
Thank you so much for making the counterpoint. I grew up in a rural setting
and would give just about anything to take back that loss of years of my life.

A few extras:

* You can't exercise, because dogs don't just bark but also chase you, and no one cares or thinks you're the asshole for complaining because you're in the country.

* Daily life is /very/ stressful. Forgot milk? Well, fuck you, buddy, because you're either doing without it or you're making a 50 minute round-trip that costs $8 extra in fuel. Want a pizza delivered? Nope. Chinese? Hahah. Need someone to come out and provide service? Oh, sorry, the first five places on Yelp don't serve your area. Grandma's calling? Sorry, but you're going to have to get used to repeating things not just once or twice but also a third and fourth time because that one bar of signal isn't going to cut it.

* Depression, drug use, and other adverse coping strategies are literally epidemic -- my entire neighborhood of stable working adults where I grew up all ended up on some combination of meth/oxycontin/xanax/antidepressants with alcohol use in excess of anything I ever see at 2 am throughout the nightlife districts of a top 10 US city.

* Oh, do you think you might need to get actual mental help? Well, those handful of upstanding people who aren't addicts are now going to be judging the hell out of you. Most conditions are just you being weak minded or morally inept. And don't even think about talking to someone or others about your thoughts, because that's not something you do. (And if it's sadness, fear, anxiety, or hallucinations, expect to have everyone suggest spurious religious interpretations instead of physical explanations, which, honestly, as a devout Christian, I now find really damaging both to peoples mental and spiritual health.)

* Friendships are forged as a practical proximal matter and not by choice. No one else benefits your mind or academic or professional achievement, and you probably won't share common interests -- you're buddies because Larry's the most likable dude on your block. In fact, even among friends, most people hold a majority of views that you find seriously revolting, and very few people appreciate any kind of artistic or intellectual activity of any kind. Romantic relationships are even less glamorous.

* Did we go over your essentials yet? Oh, wait, that'll be $70/mo for 1.5Mbps DSL that can't stream Netflix. The water bill will be double any reasonable amount and wastewater is processed in your back yard and at your own expense/peril. If you aren't lucky, you may even need your own well. You'll also have to burn trash or contract a company to come take it. Groceries and house supplies cost 30-50% more per quantity, and you have very little to no selection.

* Trash, everywhere. This alone makes me question anyone who thinks mental health is in any way better in a rural environment. It's sick having to look at collapsing, skirtless mobile homes and junk cars and scrap materials strewn across 15 peoples lawns on the way to the gas station. Any "green space" consists of trespassing behind barbed wire instead of a neatly maintained park.

~~~
sigstoat
> Daily life is /very/ stressful. [...] Want a pizza delivered? Nope. Chinese?
> Hahah.

uh. if that constitutes stressful, how do you survive receiving bad personal
news?

~~~
crx07
Ok, ok, since you want to be horsey: ambulances take 50-60 minutes to arrive
(pregnant? heart disease? prepare to feel third world terror), the police
can’t realistically save you from any kind of violent altercation or crime and
no one else will see it happen, there’s no public transportation and you can’t
walk to town—so you’re stranded on a desert island if your car ever breaks
down. There’s also a constant threat of things like venomous snakes and
predators, so expect your chihuahua to get eaten if he walks out at night
(happened not once but twice to my next door neighbors). The list of stressful
bullshit goes on and on.

~~~
jjeaff
Many people in rural areas have medivac insurance so they can be airlifted in
a serious emergency. I believe it used to cost us around $100 a year.

And let's be real, the cops don't show up during a crime in the city either.

~~~
Frondo
No, let's be real, the cops show up in cities pretty reliably. The drawback is
that sometimes they do good for the situation, while a third of the time they
end up shooting someone.

Interesting you mention medivac insurance -- I spent a number of years in a
very small town in rural west Texas and I've never heard of that. Numerous
times I heard of the race to get someone to one of the towns with a hospital
45 minutes away, though, maybe several times a year.

Maybe it's not at as widespread as you think, or somehow this town of about a
thousand people (with one gas station, one restaurant open part time, and no
grocery stores) entirely missed out on the existence of something that'd
probably have saved lives.

~~~
magduf
The other thing about hospitals is that, in a place like that, the nearest
hospital is probably in the closest small city, but that hospital is staffed
with incompetent doctors because who wants to work in a place like that? So if
you have a real emergency, you want to go to a good hospital in a larger city,
but that's much farther away.

~~~
jjeaff
That's a very short sighted opinion. There are plenty of very intelligent
doctors that love to live in the countryside.

Due to the sheer larger numbers in urban areas, I'm sure you are likely to
have the best of the best in cities, but everyone can't be treated by the top
1% of doctors.

~~~
magduf
No, it's not shortsighted at all. There aren't enough highly competent doctors
to go around and staff all the rural hospitals. My mom lives in a smallish
town (and it's at least a college town) with a hospital right down the street,
and constantly has to travel to the nearest city for medical issues because
the hospital doesn't have any decent doctors and all the specialists are in
the city.

------
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.

~~~
z9e
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.

~~~
zaroth
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.

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
In terms of body count, more people have been killed in the name of science
than in the name of religion.

~~~
zaroth
We kill with science, do we kill _in the name_ of science?

But even so, that doesn’t make all the killing in the name of religion less
bad.

~~~
xkcd-sucks
If killing is justified by an evidence-based predictive model, it's probably
killing in the name of science. This would include the Vietnam war ("Domino
theory"), the atomic bombings of Japan ("it will be less costly than
invading"), and anti terrorist drone bombing ("they fit our proven terrorist
heuristic")

~~~
frankling_
I don't follow that line of reasoning at all. "Killing in the name of
religion" would be to protect or spread some sort of metaphysical belief. The
equivalent would be something like going to war with another country to build
universities there.

~~~
acct1771
Check out this little country called Afghanistan.

Although, not sure if any Universities specifically have been built there by
the West, yet.

~~~
frankling_
Just as an exercise, it would be beneficial for you to make your argument
explicit. You would notice that it falls apart/there is none.

~~~
acct1771
We (USA) _do_ go and destroy places and institutions/governments and rebuild
as benefits us, see:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change)
or

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-
cage/wp/2016/12/2...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-
cage/wp/2016/12/23/the-cia-says-russia-hacked-the-u-s-election-here-
are-6-things-to-learn-from-cold-war-attempts-to-change-regimes/).

------
challenger22
>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 enough information yet to show a convincing link to
depression. However, the team did find a number of studies suggesting that
heavy metals like lead, pesticides, common chemicals like bisphenol A (BPA),
and noise pollution may contribute to depression, although further research is
still needed to confirm that this is the case.

The article gives me the distinct impression that the author is in denial of
the stress associated with living in a crowded place. I doubt that it has to
do much with fumes in the air- stress is a side effect of spending all day
hustling, bustling, and competing. The popular opinion in the zeitgeist is
that urban development is a good thing- so any bad effects are treatable.
Adding green space may be a decent way to treat the symptoms of city living,
but I think it will always be a stressful, mental illness-inducing lifestyle.

~~~
eslaught
Consider: for pretty much any animal I'm aware of, there's a notion of the
minimum amount of space it needs to live normally. Somehow for people we've
convinced ourselves that there is no such minimum (or it's so small as to be
absurd).

~~~
balfirevic
What do you consider acceptable minimal amount of space for a human being?

~~~
eslaught
I don't consider myself qualified to answer that question, but I do think
someone should study it. It would be interesting to try to correlate various
empirical outcomes with available living space (though of course it will be
tricky to control for all the variables, because I'm sure this correlates with
e.g. wealth).

------
CalRobert
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.

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

~~~
jweir
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.

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

~~~
CalRobert
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.

------
UnpossibleJim
There's also new research linking an immune response to a virus as a reason
for schizophrenia, which could explain living in urban centers (aka being in
constant contact with carriers), as one reason for some of the higher rates of
mental illness:

[https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-
releases/...](https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-
releases/schizophrenia-linked-with-abnormal-immune-response-to-epstein-barr-
virus)

------
spinach
I live in a residential area in a city and there is nothing worse than the
sound of a lawn mower. Those are seriously stress-inducing and awful.

~~~
neilv
Here (small lots, affluent people who pay landscapers to come by frequently
for nebulous reasons) the real scourge is weekday unnecessary leafblowers. I
think we've raised awareness in the last year, and leafblower use so far this
season has dropped dramatically, but we'll see what September is like. We
might have to try to outlaw leafblowers like some other Boston area places
have.

~~~
goatsi
Have some inspiration:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19351934](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19351934)

~~~
neilv
Thank you, this is very helpful. (Looks like something you could give to local
city councilors as well as citizens. Though I don't intend to drag it out for
years, and I'd be looking for an immediate ban on gas blowers, and also
reducing use of the electrics.)

------
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).

------
snlacks
Causation? Are we sure it's not being uderreported mental illness and people
moving to the cities because of mental illness and addiction problems?

------
RickJWagner
"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."

Wow, that is HUGE. Especially considering the population shift out of rural
areas and into cities. We'd better get some social psych types working on
this.

------
elevenoh
Anecdote:

I moved from Toronto to Waterloo.

Productivity up. 'Mental illness' gone.

Less noise, less pollution, less stress, more sense of optimism.

------
pepijndevos
It uh, just redirect me to a cookie page, even after accepting cookies.

