Sick cities: why urban living can be bad for your mental health
I drove to Birmingham last evening. The sat nav got me lost. Someone in the car park tried to sell me a used ticket, a tall and gruff man asked if I could help with a “cheeky favour” and there was an ongoing babble of menacing and undifferentiated human noise outside my Travelodge window. In the light of all this its no surprise that my search for Hinterland stories should cover city living this week, with an article which proclaims:
“living in a city roughly doubles the risk of schizophrenia – around the same level of danger that is added by smoking a lot of cannabis as a teenager.
At the same time urban living was found to raise the risk of anxiety disorders and mood disorders by 21% and 39% respectively.”