The Urban Brain by Nikolas Rose

Author:Nikolas Rose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

Understanding Urbanicity—To a New Style of Thought?

In the three decades since the publication of the The Lancet paper on “Schizophrenia and Urban Life” that we cited earlier (Lewis, David et al., 1962), thousands of articles have been published on the relationship between urbanicity and mental health or mental disorders. Almost all of the studies are epidemiological in character, using statistical correlations to evaluate associations between urban living, or one or another aspect of urban living, and particular psychiatric diagnoses. Almost all start by repeating the familiar theme that this issue is important because global urbanization trends mean that increasing proportions of the population live in cities. And almost all reviews of this body of research agree that it is difficult to draw firm conclusions because of the dearth of good evidence, the variations in measures and definitions between different studies, and the complexity of the associations that seem to be involved.

Let us take a few examples. In a recent special section of Current Opinion in Psychiatry on the theme of Urbanization and Mental Health (Szabo, 2019), a series of scholars reviewed the evidence on the relationships between urban living and psychotic disorders, mood disorders, substance misuse, eating disorders, and anxiety and stress-related disorders. Most of the studies reviewed point to the need for better data and the difficulties of undertaking comparisons between different pieces of research; thus, in the case of dementia—where rates seem lower in urban settings than in rural settings—there are pervasive problems of definitions of urban and rural, and definitions of the disorders in question vary greatly between studies (Robbins, Scott, et al., 2019). There are repeated references to the supposed benefits of ‘green space’—in reviewing neighborhood-focused research on the consequences of urbanicity for anxiety and stress-related disorders, authors conclude that “physical (e.g. green space), social (e.g. social cohesion) and biological (e.g. stress response) factors—are directly linked to the presence and severity of anxiety disorders … architectural and space design elements … can either increase anxiety and lead to trauma triggers or relieve symptoms and reinforce safety” (Ventimiglia and Seedat, 2019: 248). The allure of the microbiome is powerful with “emerging evidence that being raised in urban environments with a wide range of microbial exposure dampens the immune response to psychosocial stressors” (ibid.).

As for mood disorders, it seems that only depression has been seriously explored; the reviewers find that “individuals residing in urban areas experience increased risk of depression. Mechanistic pathways include increased exposure to noise, light and air pollution, poor quality housing, reduced diet quality, physical inactivity, economic strain and diminished social networks” (Hoare, Jacka, et al., 2019: 198). In a later review of the global literature on depression: Laura Sampson and her colleagues find “higher adjusted odds and/or severity of depression in urban areas compared with rural areas in the Netherlands, the United States, India, and Vietnam”; in China, depression was less common in urban than in rural areas, while studies in Ghana, South Africa, and the Netherlands showed no clear relationship (Sampson, Ettman, et al.

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