It Turns Out Big City Life Isn’t Making You Depressed
Hadriana Lowenkron
8/6/2021 2:00:30 PM
Hadriana Lowenkron wrote this article in Bloomberg:
Cities have long battled a poor reputation as cauldrons of stress, fostering high rates of depression and other mental illnesses. But new research suggests that big cities actually have some mental health benefits over their smaller counterparts.
The study, to be published Aug. 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, draws on mathematical models and multiple datasets to try to gauge how city size and the “built environment,’’ like structures and roads, influence depression.
It turns out that the casual social interactions that big cities force upon us - even the occasionally cold or callous ones - help buffer against mental health strain. Fast-walking pedestrians are, after all, at least seeing other people. Smaller cities, with less hubbub, may not offer as many benefits in fighting depression.
More research is needed but there are potential lessons for urban planners, said Andrew Stier, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of Chicago and lead author of the study, “Evidence and Theory for Lower Rates of Depression in Large U.S. Urban Areas.” For planners in smaller cities and suburbs to make use of this finding, it’s all about heightening opportunities for social interaction.
“Can we put innovations in to get people moving around the city more, to improve access for people who are cut off from the rest of the city, so that people actually can travel to other neighborhoods?” Stier said in an interview. “We still have to look and see what the data says about that, but that would be the most promising idea at a lower level from this research.”
Stier and his colleagues analyzed four datasets for depression rates across U.S. urban areas: the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System; and two Twitter datasets of individuals and their messages in an attempt to find “depressive symptoms.” The researchers controlled for education, rate of population change, race, and income effects on depression rates for larger cities. The most recent data available was from 2019, and so it doesn’t account for any effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The connection between social interaction and mental well-being has consistently been affirmed in the medical field, said Dr. Dan Iosifescu, an associate professor of psychiatry and director of clinical research at the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, affiliated with NYU Langone Health. And the lockdowns associated with Covid-19 make research into the topic all the more important.
“There are some advantages in cities because all of these disorders - depression, anxiety - they're really associated with increases in social isolation. It's in part why this recent pandemic has been so terrible for mental health,” said Iosifescu, who isn’t associated with the study. “In cities, while they're stressful in many ways, they actually have less isolation and more ability for people to network.”
Cities have long battled a poor reputation as cauldrons of stress, fostering high rates of depression and other mental illnesses. But new research suggests that big cities actually have some mental health benefits over their smaller counterparts.
The study, to be published Aug. 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, draws on mathematical models and multiple datasets to try to gauge how city size and the “built environment,’’ like structures and roads, influence depression.
It turns out that the casual social interactions that big cities force upon us - even the occasionally cold or callous ones - help buffer against mental health strain. Fast-walking pedestrians are, after all, at least seeing other people. Smaller cities, with less hubbub, may not offer as many benefits in fighting depression.
More research is needed but there are potential lessons for urban planners, said Andrew Stier, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of Chicago and lead author of the study, “Evidence and Theory for Lower Rates of Depression in Large U.S. Urban Areas.” For planners in smaller cities and suburbs to make use of this finding, it’s all about heightening opportunities for social interaction.
“Can we put innovations in to get people moving around the city more, to improve access for people who are cut off from the rest of the city, so that people actually can travel to other neighborhoods?” Stier said in an interview. “We still have to look and see what the data says about that, but that would be the most promising idea at a lower level from this research.”
Stier and his colleagues analyzed four datasets for depression rates across U.S. urban areas: the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System; and two Twitter datasets of individuals and their messages in an attempt to find “depressive symptoms.” The researchers controlled for education, rate of population change, race, and income effects on depression rates for larger cities. The most recent data available was from 2019, and so it doesn’t account for any effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The connection between social interaction and mental well-being has consistently been affirmed in the medical field, said Dr. Dan Iosifescu, an associate professor of psychiatry and director of clinical research at the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, affiliated with NYU Langone Health. And the lockdowns associated with Covid-19 make research into the topic all the more important.
“There are some advantages in cities because all of these disorders - depression, anxiety - they're really associated with increases in social isolation. It's in part why this recent pandemic has been so terrible for mental health,” said Iosifescu, who isn’t associated with the study. “In cities, while they're stressful in many ways, they actually have less isolation and more ability for people to network.”