photo: menshealth
Urban living, to many, is a form of evolution that mankind must go through, like some sort of adaption of the fittest.
But those people who have for years warned about the stresses of city living have now found a new ally in research recently published that points to a higher rate of emotional problems in city dwellers.
More than half of the world's population now lives in a high density centre. That amount will probably rise to 75% in the next 3 decades.
Urbanization in the past was the mother of all invention. The Renaissance, the industrial revolution and globalization were all a consequence of high density living.
What had not been explored so far, was the question of how well man is adapting to such, some say fierce, surroundings.
Although city living has been associated with prosperity and access to better living conditions, research now shows that a person's mind suffers both in attention span and memory when living in a large city. Both these problem cause stress and ultimately can lead to emotional problems. People in cities are more prone to suffer from anxiety and depression, and schizophrenia is much higher in city settings than in rural areas.
Now studies suggest that children born in large cities have three times the risk of having an emotional disorder compared to their rural counterparts.
Most people would think that the quick pace of the city is what causes the incidence of emotional problems. But studies actually have revealed that certain realities of city life are the ones that are pushing the human brain toward a diseased state.
Some of the culprits, researchers point out, are noise, pollution and social pressure. Social pressure is particularly onerous, in taht the social strain engages stress circuits in the brain, the same ones that are affected in people who have mental illness or mood disorders.
Of particular importance, was the effect of social stress on the amygdala. This small part of the brain serves as a danger sensor, and is responsible for the flight or fight response observed in people who suffer from anxiety. The same research, when done on subjects living in country settings or scarcely populated areas, showed that the amygdala was not affected or engaged, which was a very significant difference from the stress response observed in city dwellers.
What is causing the anxiety and depression then, seems to be the overstimulation of the amydgala in people living in large cities, since those who live there are in a constant state of subconscious alert. This in the long run can lead to depression and disturbances.
Another aspect of the research was the much higher incidence of schizophrenia in people who live in large cities. In this research, the area of the brain that showed unusual activity was the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (PaCC). People living in the cities showed the highest level of activity in this region of the brain. The PaCC and the amydgala are closely related in function. Certain activity in the PaCC serves to block activity in the amygdala. If the PaCC is damaged due to overactivity, it then fails to stop the amygdala from overacting too.
If the stress of city living was subtracted from the individuals at risk for schizophrenia, this imbalance might never surface.
Another interesting finding was that the longer a person lived in a large city, the less communication ensues between the PaCC and the amygdala. What was even more interesting though, was that this communication was re-established in those people who had a large social network. Frequent interaction with friends stimulates a hormone, vasopressin, that boosts feedback to the amygdala. However, this alone is not enough to completely eradicate city stress. Other environmental factors can cause dysfunction of PaCC and amygdala regions, such as noise, pollution and lack of green spaces.
But the research did conclude that almost a third of all schizophrenia cases could be avoided if a child were reared in a rural setting.
One of the goals of the study is to give clues to those researchers that are planning studies to bring about changes in the city to reduce stressors and increase interaction.
Source: Scientific American 3.20.13
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