Mental health articles

The goal of understanding how social stress acts as a risk factor for mental disorders in urban populations may be pursued onseveral levels. Effects of infrastructure (population density, accessto green space), economic issues (rates of employment, workingconditions), environmental pollutants (air pollution, noise, toxins,light) and social conditions (social coherence, density of socialnetworks) need to be considered and weighted in order to identifythe most potent contributors to social stress. Vice versa, it should not be missed to have a closer look at probably protective factors of the rural environment. Better education, higher employment and easier access to health care have been identified as factors contributing to improved health in cities, but these factors have tobe actively created and maintained through policy interventions. Investigations aimed at a better understanding of social stress in the urban environment should have a high spatialre solution, combing tools from different fields like epidemiology,environmental science, social sciences, and medicine. Tools area vailable for measuring size and complexity of social networks,perceived social standing, subjective stress level, major life events,and others. Increasingly, cross-sectional studies withsingle time points of observation are replaced by studies focusingthe daily flow of life and longitudinal observations of cohorts, oftenstarting with birth or young age. Also, it has been successful toprobe hypotheses on neural social stress processing by applying modern imaging techniques in healthy volunteers. Detecting themajor factors which contribute to the increased risk for mental illness in urban environments might not only give valuable insightsinto etiological aspects of mental disorders but also inform policymakers about relevant health risks of one of our most important environments.

Tags: disorders, mental, mental disorders, social stress