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City residents live with mental illness at higher rates than general population
- CalRobert 7y agoCities 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 7y agoThis is why electric cars are so important. No exhaust, no noise. They're perfect for urban use.
- merpnderp 7y agoElectric self driving cars are so important. Sitting in and navigating traffic are huge sources of stress for urbanites. White knuckling it at 70mph in bumper to bumper traffic, or spending 45 minutes in stop and go traffic twice a day, are certainly high stress situations.
- CalRobert 7y agoThat doesn't sound like a real city, tbh. Just a sprawling suburb. TBF 98% of what the US calls "cities" are just giant suburbs of themselves.
- CalRobert 7y agoElectric cars don't solve: * kids being killed if they try to play in the street * urban centres being destroyed by parking lots * elderly people being terrified to cross the street * Dead cyclists etc...
- toomuchtodo 7y agoThey do solve allowing those of us who want to live in rural areas to do so in an environmentally friendly way. No cities please.
- klipt 7y ago80% 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?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- thrower123 7y agoThat'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?
- magduf 7y agoMuch 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.
- Ma8ee 7y agoThen use the cars in rural areas where they have a place. They don't belong in cities, electric or not. And one of the reasons that cities are better for the environment is less need of transportation.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoBut are cities better for people if you're cramming everyone into less space and want them to move about less? If research says no, we shouldn't be promoting cities, but ways of reducing environmental impact while also reducing density when zoning/land use planning. "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."
- kelnos 7y agoExhaust and noise is a problem certainly, but IMO a bigger problem is the ridiculous amount of space that gets reserved to support cars that could be used to support people instead.
- CalRobert 7y agoIf only residents went to planning meetings to complain about a lack of places for people to sleep, instead of for cars to sleep.
- jweir 7y agoThey 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.
- rhapsodic 7y ago>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. How would I get my drum kit to a gig in the heart of such a city?
- semafour 7y agoIn 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.
- CompanionCuuube 7y agoDo you guarantee that the legal items one would normally transport in a car will be allowed on public transportation?
- CalRobert 7y agoI 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.
- eswat 7y agoI believe it’s the urban planning involved in accommodating the physical traffic of vehicles the GP is getting at, not the emissions. Electric vehicles do nothing to address roads occupying more space than sidewalks, for example.
- progfix 7y agoOnly when they are significantly smaller than current cars. It isn't just about the emissions, it's about the space that cars take and the speed they are moving.
- logfromblammo 7y agoThe electric passenger vehicle most important to cities is actually... elevators. Press a button to call a ride. Press a button to select a destination. 24-hour automated operation, and free-to-use for passengers with hand-carried items. Compared with an elevator, a street-driven electric car is a bit of a nightmare. The closest horizontal analog is commuter trains on electrified rails, and even those are shaped by car culture. If a city were planned like a building, and horizontal movement given over to externally-powered single-car on-demand vehicles that move exclusively on dedicated trackways, there wouldn't be so much space and energy wasted on cars.
- lr4444lr 7y agoWhen 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?
- deathanatos 7y agoAs 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.
- jmchuster 7y agoQuick 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%
- magduf 7y agoNYC 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.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoThere's no qualifier you can put behind that first comma that makes your opening statement true in the general case.
- brandur 7y agoI really think there's something to this. I've been living in a dense urban area that does a poor job of traffic control (San Francisco), and of all the "city problems" that I find tearing most at my mental well-being is the poor urban design. After a while you realize that there's no such thing as a stress-free, liberating walk. Traffic is so all-pervasive that everywhere you go, you're constantly negotiating your way around vehicular traffic, most of which believes that yielding to pedestrians is a distant second concern to getting around as quickly as possible at any cost. Every cross-walk you use you have to watch yourself for drivers turning left and right who aren't paying attention. Every four-way stop you have to look around and make sure that drivers are actually going to stop for you. Blocks are short, so this is all you're doing all the time. The sheer volume of infrastructure that's built for cars means there's not much left over. The only places to get that that sense of liberation back besides distant parks or suburbs well outside the municipal core. Any parks of non-trivial size in the city are filled to the brim with roads, many of which actually act as throughfare shortcuts for standard traffic most of the time (e.g. JFK in Golden Gate Park), so you're facing all the car problems as any other street. After a while it's hard not to be constantly on edge looking out for the next person who's about to do something dangerous to you, which is quite stressful and almost certainly has negative long-term mental effects. It really doesn't have to be the case though — contrast the car-first streets of San Francisco and other American cities to the pedestrian plazas and legitimately car-free urban parks of some cities and Europe, and it's a world of difference. We could be doing so much better.
- phil248 7y agoStrongly agreed. Nearly all of the major irritants and genuine dangers I face on a daily basis in an urban center are directly caused by cars.
- carlosyasu91 7y agoFully agree with you, having been in Stuttgart, Germany for a Summer it was great to be able to get anywhere in public transportation
- challenger22 7y ago>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 7y agoConsider: 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).
- gumby 7y agoBut within a species (I'm thinking of human's naturally) there seem to be cultural variances.
- nradov 7y agoSome cultures have learned to tolerate minimal personal space as a necessary evil. But when people from those cultures get wealthy they almost always choose to buy more space and privacy.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pepijndevos 7y agoIt uh, just redirect me to a cookie page, even after accepting cookies.
- spinach 7y agoI 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 7y agoHere (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 7y agoHave some inspiration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19351934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19351934
- neilv 7y agoThank 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.)
- iwasakabukiman 7y agoWhy is that? People need to mow their lawns...
- jackcosgrove 7y agoEvery 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.
- LiquidSky 7y agoI feel the same way...for a day or so. Then I remember that it's the peace and serenity of a tomb and miss the city.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- sdegutis 7y agoIt's the peace and serenity of nature, which is often more alive than we are. How many songwriters over the past century have written about being lonely in the midst of constant but worthless interactions?
- wearenotsafe 7y agoIt sounds strange to label something brimming with life as "tomb". If nature is a tomb then a city is a prison.
- captainredbeard 7y agoI think the magic combo is spending a large amount of time (not necessarily continuous) in nature with a large group of friends.
- CompanionCuuube 7y agoA tomb is normally defined as a place of no life, while the opposite is true. There is a lot of life and biodiversity in nature.
- username444 7y ago
- zaroth 7y agoNot 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 7y agoI 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 7y agoIn 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 7y agoIn terms of body count, more people have been killed in the name of science than in the name of religion.
- zaroth 7y agoWe 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.
- UnpossibleJim 7y agoThere'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/schizophrenia-linked-with-abnormal-immune-response-to-epstein-barr-virus https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/...
- woodpanel 7y agoI 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).
- RickJWagner 7y ago"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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- snlacks 7y agoCausation? Are we sure it's not being uderreported mental illness and people moving to the cities because of mental illness and addiction problems?
- elevenoh 7y agoAnecdote: I moved from Toronto to Waterloo. Productivity up. 'Mental illness' gone. Less noise, less pollution, less stress, more sense of optimism.
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