“New research, new methods and new data offer some promising pathways for novel theories and concepts to understand how urban existence gets under the skin. For example, we could combine approaches from biological and social sciences to understand how the precarious social lives of rural migrants in contemporary Shanghai are implicated in the development of psychiatric disorders in that rapidly expanding urban environment. It might mean combining decades of detailed epidemiological data from the streets and housing estates of south-east London with current research on the neuroscience of stress – and with anthropological work that zooms in on the micro-interactions of street-life. The task for researchers is challenging. Are the same processes at work in cities as different as Shanghai and London? Will the number of variables and factors in these neurosocial pathways be so large as to defy our attempts to frame them into a coherent theory? Nonetheless, if we are going to get to grips with the consequences of urbanisation for mental health today, we need to start thinking very differently about city living – not simply as a form of social organisation that has biological consequences, but as a form of life whose neurological and sociological aspects are quite inseparable from one another.”

rest @ https://theconversation.com/the-metropolis-and-mental-health-are-big-cities-making-us-sick-49264