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Research has shown city dwellers are more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression – but could individual buildings have a negative impact on wellbeing?
Screaming sirens, overcrowding, traffic; life in the city isn’t always relaxing.
These stressors aren’t simply inconvenient or irritating, though; research has suggested that urban living has a significant impact on mental health. One meta-analysis found that those living in cities were 21% more likely to experience an anxiety disorder – mood disorders were even higher, at 39%. People who grew up in a city are twice as likely to develop schizophrenia as those who grew up in the countryside, with a 2005 study suggesting this link may even be causal.
Urban stressors appear to have a biological impact, too. A 2011 study from the Central Institute of Mental Health at the University of Heidelberg found that city living was associated with greater stress responses in both the amygdala and the cingulate cortex – areas linked to emotional regulation, depression and anxiety. This increased activation, the research team said, could have a “lasting effect”, both on the brain’s development and its ongoing susceptibility to mental illness.
The studies are part of a wider field of environmental psychology that seeks to understand how individuals interact with their environments, and how those environments can affect our social lives, relationships and even our mental health.
– Emily Reynolds
I also wonder about the psychological impact of destroying communities (including housing) in the name of ‘progress’.
If there is something common to every human being, it is the fact that our childhood experiences impact heavily on our adult development and remnant trauma. If we have experiences of growing up in a humble home, where memories have been nurtured, and that home is subsequently razed to the ground to make way for highrises and road infrastructure, a part of us is destroyed. A part of our human experience is nullified…in invalidated…
A home is one of the fundamental human rights and the place where a child (should) feel anchored and protected from the world. When a child grows up in such a place, when their memories of growing up there bring their heart warmth and joy, and then they see that it no longer exists or is seen to ‘serve a useful purpose’ because of other (usually capitalist) values, their world is diminished..it shrinks…and what is left is an emptiness and a pain of deep deep loss.
Could it be, at least in the first world, that part of the epidemic of anxiety and depression that we are experiencing, is the direct result of a collective mourning of a unilaterial abolishing of the values of stability and certainty and humility, as symbolised by the countless of ordinary, humble homes, usually lining busy roads, that are judged…and then…written off?
I wonder (with pain in my own heart)…as my own parents face this terrible tragedy in the name of ‘progress as the ‘world’ places its stamp of human worth and experience in an indelible way…one more time…because the Mayor of my city, in Australia, thinks that in doing so, he is creating a ‘new world class city’….I beg to differ…vehemently!!!!