Can City Living Make You Crazy?
时间：2012-10-22 05:09:16
（单词翻译:单击）
Can City Living Make You Crazy?
Could city living be making you crazy? A new report says that weak social ties may be to blame for the higher incidence of mental disorders1 in cities. It’s not the hustle2 and bustle3 of living in the “concrete jungle” surrounded by people that’s makes city dwellers4 mentally unstable5 either. In fact, it’s the opposite. Cities packed with people can actually make people feel disconnected, anonymous6 and socially isolated7. The irony8 of being surrounded by millions of people, yet feeling like a hermit9.
Dr. Stanley Zammit of Cardiff University in Wales led the study published in Archives of General
Psychiatry10, where the goal of the research was to determine whether individual, school or area characteristics had a specific link to psychosis. Living in a city was associated with a 41 percent higher chance of psychosis compared to rural living. However, the lifetime risk of schizophrenia is about 1 percent, so the lifetime risk of living in a city and getting the disease might rise to about 1.5 percent, which isn’t a huge difference.
The team gathered data from more than 200,000 people living in Sweden. Those individuals were all born between 1972 and 1977. The scientists
analyzed11 diagnoses of schizophrenia and other psychoses recorded in Sweden’s national health registry up until 2003.
The team analyzed multiple variables related to the individuals, including the schools they attended and the neighborhoods they lived in. Out of all the variables examined, a weak social connection at the school level was the most significant. This finding turned up in the proportion of kids who were immigrants, who changed cities between ages 8 and 16 or who were raised in a single-parent home. For children with similar backgrounds to the predominate demographic of their school, the risk of psychosis was lower.
Limits of the study included a lack of data on potentially important variables such as drug use. Additionally, the researchers
noted12 an inherent difficulty in adequately measuring neighborhood or area-level social fragmentation.
Invite a few friends and get out of the city for a walk in nature. Other studies have shown getting outdoors for some “green exercise” may help
curb13 depression too. Other research has shown that social networks provide support to promote mental health and
buffer14 stress. In fact, recent research showed happy people talk more. Something to think about as you avoid eye contact in the urban jungle.
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