The effects of changes to the built environment on the mental health and well-being of adults: Systematic review

Nature doesn't judge you - how urban nature supports young people's mental health and wellbeing in a diverse UK city

Reviewed research reveals a lack of young people's voices articulating if and how urban nature supports their mental health and wellbeing. This paper presents qualitative research with young multi-ethnic urban residents living in a northern UK city and offers an important counter-narrative to the pervasive notion of childhood nature-deficit disorder. Using interviews and creative arts workshops, we explored the value of urban nature for the mental health and wellbeing of 24 young people aged 17-27 years, 9 of whom had lived experience of mental health difficulties. Trees, water, open spaces and views were frequently experienced nature typologies offering benefits. Deteriorating landscapes, young people's shifting identities and perceived time pressures disrupted support. Young people expressed how urban nature encounters were experienced as accepting and relational, offering a: stronger sense of self; feelings of escape; connection and care with the human and non-human world.

Urban environment and mental health: the NAMED project, protocol for a mixed-method study

INTRODUCTION

Mental health issues appear as a growing problem in modern societies and tend to be more frequent in big cities. Where increased evidence exists for positive links between nature and mental health, associations between urban environment characteristics and mental health are still not well understood. These associations are highly complex and require an interdisciplinary and integrated research approach to cover the broad range of mitigating factors. This article presents the study protocol of a project called Nature Impact on Mental Health Distribution that aims to generate a comprehensive understanding of associations between mental health and the urban residential environment.

METHODS AND ANALYSIS

Following a mixed-method approach, this project combines quantitative and qualitative research. In the quantitative part, we analyse among the Brussels urban population associations between the urban residential environment and mental health, taking respondents' socioeconomic status and physical health into account. Mental health is determined by the mental health indicators in the national Health Interview Survey (HIS). The urban residential environment is described by subjective indicators for the participant's dwelling and neighbourhood present in the HIS and objective indicators for buildings, network infrastructure and green environment developed for the purpose of this project. We assess the mediating role of physical activity, social life, noise and air pollution. In the qualitative part, we conduct walking interviews with Brussels residents to record their subjective well-being in association with their neighbourhood. In the validation part, results from these two approaches are triangulated and evaluated through interviews and focus groups with stakeholders of healthcare and urban planning sectors.

ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION

The Privacy Commission of Belgium and ethical committee from University Hospital of Antwerp respectively approved quantitative database merging and qualitative interviewing. We will share project results with a wide audience including the scientific community, policy authorities and civil society through scientific and non-expert communication.

Population-Based Approaches to Mental Health: History, Strategies, and Evidence

There is growing recognition in the fields of public health and mental health services research that the provision of clinical services to individuals is not a viable approach to meeting the mental health needs of a population. Despite enthusiasm for the notion of population-based approaches to mental health, concrete guidance about what such approaches entail is lacking, and evidence of their effectiveness has not been integrated. Drawing from research and scholarship across multiple disciplines, this review provides a concrete definition of population-based approaches to mental health, situates these approaches within their historical context in the United States, and summarizes the nature of these approaches and their evidence. These approaches span three domains: (a) social, economic, and environmental policy interventions that can be implemented by legislators and public agency directors, (b) public health practice interventions that can be implemented by public health department officials, and (c) health care system interventions that can be implemented by hospital and health care system leaders.

Loneliness and depression among older European adults: The role of perceived neighborhood built environment

Depression and loneliness act in a synergistic way among older adults. We tested two indicators of the perceived neighborhood built environment (BE) as moderators of the association between these conditions in older European adults. Positive perceptions of neighborhood BE were related to lower levels of loneliness but not to major depressive disorder (MDD). Reporting low BE usability was significantly related to a higher likelihood of feeling lonely except for those suffering from MDD, whereas reporting low BE walkability was significantly related with a high likelihood of loneliness particularly among those with MDD. Therefore, improving neighborhood BE and, specifically, its walkability, might result in a reduction in the prevalence of loneliness.

Digging deeper in Shanghai: towards a 'mechanism-rich' epidemiology

Background

There are very few close-up sociological or anthropological data informing epidemiological and psychiatric research design and/or contributing to our understanding of the relationship between mental health and specific forms of urban life. Furthermore, research on the relationships between urbanicity and mental disorder has paid little attention to the global diversity of urban experience, such as in cities in China, India and Brazil.

Methods

Two innovative methods can be employed to unveil the diversified urban experience of migrants in China, i.e. an ethnography-informed sociological deep surveying instrument and an ecological momentary assessment with a smartphone app. This article introduces the design and pilot survey of these new instruments towards a ‘mechanism-rich’ epidemiology.

Results

The ethnography-informed survey instrument enabled us to include some of the issues from the ethnography and successfully ‘dig deeper’ into respondents’ social experience. The pilot of the smartphone app serves as ‘proof of principle’ that we can recruit respondents in Shanghai, and that we can receive and use the data.

Conclusions

Both of these pilots have demonstrated good feasibility for studying mobility, urban life and mental health. Our next steps will be to extend the Shanghai sample, to use the app in Sao Paulo and Toronto and then hopefully in India and Africa.

Neighborhoods, psychological distress, and the quest for causality

Neighborhood characteristics have been associated with psychological distress, but it is uncertain whether these associations are causal. The current article reviews data from interventions and quasi-experimental studies that have addressed the question of causality of neighborhood associations. Overall, data from neighborhood interventions, longitudinal studies, and twin studies have provided only limited and inconsistent evidence to support causal interpretation of neighborhood associations with psychological distress: very few findings have been replicated across different samples, and many associations have been observed only with some of the multiple measures included the studies. Studies that examine the effects of neighborhood change on people's wellbeing are needed to improve causal inference and policy relevance of neighborhood studies.

Does selective migration bias the health impact assessment of urban regeneration programmes in cross-sectional studies? Findings from a Dutch case study

We examined if the assessment of the health impact of a national Dutch regeneration programme depends on using either a repeated cross-sectional or longitudinal study design. This is important as only the latter design can incorporate migration patterns. For both designs, we compared trends in medication use between target and control districts. We found differences in medication use trends to be modest under the longitudinal design, and not demonstrable under the repeated cross-sectional design. The observed differences were hardly influenced by migration patterns. We conclude that in the Netherlands migration patterns had little effect on the health impact assessment of this national urban regeneration programme, so either the cross-sectional or longitudinal evaluation study design will do.