Building better mental health in cities from the ground up

The frenetic, isolating nature of city life can be a day-to-day struggle for millions of people. An environmental cocktail of densely packed streets and homes, cramped and lengthy commutes and noise pollution as well as significant pockets of poverty and deprivation can take their toll. As a result, mental ill health and urban life are inextricably linked.

With urban areas expected to house two-thirds of the world’s population by 2050 and some cities, such as in China, undergoing unprecedented expansion, the relationship between urban environments and mental health – and what to do about it – is rapidly coming to the fore.

“Public health is an important component of the built environment, but all too often this focuses only on physical health,” says Layla McKay, founder and director of the Centre for Urban Development and Mental Health. The thinktank was set up in 2015 to bring together researchers, policymakers and planners across the globe to push for urban space designs that create mentally healthier cities.

Projects paving the way

A well-designed urban space can have a positive influence on people’s wellbeing and help prevent mental health problems developing or becoming worse, according to McKay.

“Mental health plays a huge role in the overall burden of disease around the entire world,” she says. “It’s prevalent in every country. The statistics do tell us that people who live in cities have a 40% increased risk of depression, a 20% increased risk of anxiety and double the risk of schizophrenia.”

So far, projects paving the way have tended to be small. Examples include one in Sheffield, England, says MacKay, where a green space parks initiative, the Improving Wellbeing Through Urban Nature project, is aiming to promote well-designed urban green spaces as a cost-effective way to boost mental and physical health. Another is the network of Dementia Friendly Communities across the UK.

Urban living takes its toll

There is a considerable body of evidence (pdf) internationally suggesting that urban living, especially poorly designed environments, can have negative effects on mental health. For example, substandard, overcrowded, damp housing has been proven to affect people’s capacity to cope, while the lack of something as basic as a play area can influence children’s wellbeing.

Meanwhile, compared with non-urban areas, cities around the world have an increased prevalence of acute mental illnesses, as well as other problems such as stress and isolation.

A recent report (pdf) from the Mental Health Foundation (MHF) in the UK concluded that cities becoming more crowded and the rising proportion of people living alone (up from 6% in 1972 to 12% in 2008) contributes to higher levels of loneliness, which is a risk factor for mental ill health.

Another study, Poverty and Mental Health, published by the MHF for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation emphasised the adverse connections between mental health and deprivation, which tends to be most concentrated in urban areas. The report’s recommendations included that policymakers consider mental health as a core part of the urban planning process, saying it “should be promoted as good practice”.

The role of planners and architects

It makes sense, McKay says, to take into account, for example, that improving street lighting and housing layout might reduce fear and anxiety about safety. The same goes for using urban design to produce plentiful open, green spaces (pdf) that encourage regular interaction in “pro-social spaces” and “a sense of community” with the goal of reducing isolation.

“[There] is a real opportunityfor for people who work in the planning, architecture and urban-focused professions to have an impact on mental health,” she adds.

Experts at the WHO Collaborating Centre for Healthy Urban Environments at the University of the West of England (UWE), which works in tandem with the World Health Organisation’s international Healthy Cities Project, concur that urban planning could have a substantial role to play in cities being designed with mental wellbeing in mind.

Related: Is city living bad for your health?

Sarah Burgess, senior lecturer in the department of architecture and built environment at UWE, says there is definitely momentum towards mental wellness becoming a greater priority for planners globally. She points to the popularity of happiness indices internationally and to initiatives such as Happy City in Canada, which promotes wellbeing as a legitimate goal of urban design, as examples of a growing appetite for new approaches.

But when it comes to individual cities spearheading attempts to put mental wellbeing at the centre of planning strategies, Burgess concludes that they are rare.

According to Daniel Black, an urban planner and fellow at the WHO Collaborating Centre, while planning professionals and researchers are increasingly becoming advocates for prioritising mental health in planning decisions, there is still some way to go before decision-makers in governments catch up.

“Mental health is still lagging behind,” he says. “Even physical health is only beginning to get on the radar. How those in control of urban development are integrating health into development is negligible.”

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Building better mental health in cities from the ground up

Nation diary: Llangynidr: Here lies the rough ground the place politicians should tread

A small waterfall on the river Usk at Llangynidr bridge. Photograph: P Tomlins/Alamy

Handful of valleys in Wales are much more verdant than that of the Usk, its river heron-sentried, swift and graceful in between banks lapidary with primrose, stitchwort and bluebell. Fallen trunks wedged high over the water bear witness to winter floods. Two sandpipers pulse and dip in time to the whistling diminuendo of their calls. A robin shrills its alarm. From the hump-backed and cut-watered medieval bridge the riverside way winds a long, engrossing mile east to the confluence pool of the Nant Cleisfer, up which impetuous moorland stream my journey lies. At the final settlement of Blaen y Cwm, abandoned to sheep and entropy now, wood sorrel’s flowering beneath mossed walls. I select a leaf, nip and chew at its apple astringency.

Ring ouzels scud ahead and larks falter skyward on ladders of song as I climb to a ford exactly where the path from Tredegar arrives from the south. The substantial plateau among Usk and Taf has prolonged fascinated me. It’s arduous terrain, deep heather pitted with hollows that mark the place underground chambers have collapsed. Some of the most tough problems in British caving lie deep beneath its surface in techniques the identified lengths of which are extended each 12 months by committed and hardy-humorous devotees of a sport in comparison to which mountaineering seems secure and effete. Also hard now for an old man like me, I consider, with a wry smile of gratitude and a host of recollections of exquisite crystal beauties that lie darkly in the rock far under my feet.

This barrier landscape of moon-like austerity amongst the wealthy nation of the Southern March and publish-industrial desolation of the mining valleys holds other resonances. Half a mile south-west of the ford at the head of the Nant Cleisfer is the Chartists’ Cave, exactly where pikes of the insurrectionists have been stored just before their 1839 attack on Newport. Far more just lately inside of the radical tradition, Aneurin Bevan and his buddies often walked up here from his Tredegar house, discussing as they went the political venture that should be his enduring legacy – the NHS, the dismantling of which we are now despairing witnesses. The three excellent stones, neglected and vandalised, that comprise his monument lie just beyond the moor at the back of Waun-y-Pound industrial estate. I would like to see our politicians walk this rough ground to it, quietly, in mindful pilgrimage.

Nation diary: Llangynidr: Here lies the rough ground the place politicians should tread

Why Atlanta Fell: A Mind"s Eye Report From The Ground

When the details comes
We’ll know what we’re manufactured from
And the skyline increasing
High-rise eyes see for you

–Beck, The Data

Winter storm Leon roared by means of Atlanta this week creating far more mayhem than Sherman on a bourbon bender.  Folks in snowier parts of the country have been wondering how 1 storm, amounting to three or so inches of snow, could carry a city so massive to its knees—to the level the place the mayor and governor are engaged in a public street fight about who’s to blame. I take place to live in Atlanta and may be capable to shed some light on problem.

Who’s genuinely to blame? Properly, everyone.

Thanks to a cognitive foible called the availability heuristic, we overestimate the probabilities of anything taking place, or not taking place, primarily based on what’s most readily accessible in memory. Because it is been a handful of years considering that Atlanta had witnessed anything like Leon, most of the city was working in a sort of brain fog about what could come about if issues had been worse than forecasted.

Atlanta Downtown Connector at evening (Photograph credit score: Wikipedia)

And items had been substantially worse. The forecast showed Atlanta taking a glancing blow from Leon, a dusting of snow and dose of cold, but instead the city took a punch to the gut. Inches of moist snow turned to ice in quick order, and inside hrs the roads have been a skating rink.

When no one particular is prepared for a worse end result than predicted, every person reacts at as soon as when the snow hits the fan. The “everyone” in this case contains the college districts that shut down halfway via the day, triggering mother and father to flood the roadways to get their kids. At roughly the same time, employers have been choosing that they ought to allow people to depart early to keep away from an final result that was previously a foregone conclusion: gridlock.

If you have ever driven via Atlanta at rush hour (that’s anytime among three and 7pm), you know that it is generally a challenging commute. Add to that tens of 1000′s of mother and father frantically striving to reach their kids, thousands a lot more staff trying to beat the rush, and a sheet of ice across the highways.

About individuals highways – many have asked why the city and state didn’t have emergency crews at the prepared just in case factors have been worse than forecasted. I’m going to chalk that up to one more cognitive bias I call siloing. Silo thinking takes place when groups don’t connect the details dots between every other. City officials really do not exchange information with state officials. Neither exchanges info with the school districts or Atlanta’s significant employers, and so forth. By the time emergency autos have been sent out to de-ice the roads, the predicament was already bumper-to-bumper. As well late.

After almost everything falls apart, siloing turns into blaming. That’s why Kasim Reed, the mayor of Atlanta and Nathan Deal, the governor of Georgia, have been exchanging blows in national information. No one wants to admit that their organization was operating in an info silo before the catastrophe, even although all of them had been. (Worth noting, the governor has given that publicly apologized for unpreparedness. Mayor Reed has also said “mistakes have been created.”)

The availability heuristic and siloing components of this tragedy the two hinged on forecasted information, which says a great deal about our ever-growing reliance on predictions. The Climate Channel—our go-to source for all issues weather—is primarily based, ironically, in Atlanta. We construction our days largely around what forecasters tell us is coming up coming (which is kind of a mainline feed into the availability heuristic), not close to what could come next if individuals forecasts are wrong. Possessing stated that, it need to be noted that The Climate Channel recommended of potentially harmful circumstances at 4 am Tuesday. No matter whether or not that was ample time for government officials to act is debatable, but I can tell you from firsthand expertise that it is as well late to stem the tide of site visitors.

Leon’s KO of Atlanta is evidence optimistic that our reliance on predictions, saddled with our in-created biases can, and eventually will, lead to unpleasant outcomes. Instead of blaming, we’d be better served by understanding.  There’s a lesson in Leon for just about everyone, and it will not be lengthy before we’ll need to apply the takeaways.

You can locate David DiSalvo on Twitter @neuronarrative and at his internet site, The Day-to-day Brain. His newest guide is Brain Changer: How Harnessing Your Brain’s Electrical power To Adapt Can Alter Your Life.

Why Atlanta Fell: A Mind"s Eye Report From The Ground

Ground Cherries: Sweet Small Fruits Bursting with Nutritional vitamins

Ground cherries (also called husk cherries and cape gooseberries) are tiny, orange fruits that grow within thin, lantern-like husks. They belong to the nightshade family, and are native to temperate and subtropical regions during the globe, such as North America. Regardless of their identify, ground cherries are much more closely related to tomatoes than cherries, and their sweet, refreshing taste – comparable to that of strawberries – lends them properly to salads, desserts, jams, and juices.

Ground cherries are common with gardeners because they increase in most types of soil (such as poor good quality soil), even though they are equally cherished for their well being benefits.

Rich in vitamin A – one hundred grams of ground cherries incorporate 720 international units of vitamin A, which is 14 percent of an adult’s suggested daily intake. Vitamin A is necessary for sustaining excellent vision and skin well being, boosting immune function, and gene transcription. It is also an antioxidant, which means that it can neutralize the damaging effects of free radicals, thereby shielding us from cancer and degenerative diseases like macular degeneration, rheumatoid arthritis, and cystic fibrosis.

Very good supply of vitamin C – 100 grams of ground cherries provide us with eleven milligrams of vitamin C, which is 18 percent of our RDI. Vitamin C is a water-soluble nutrient that is required for collagen production (which, in turn, quickens the body’s ability to fix wounds), reducing blood stress, guaranteeing the correct dilation of blood vessels (therefore protecting us from ailments like atherosclerosis and congestive heart failure), fighting cataracts, and boosting the immune program. Like vitamin A, vitamin C is also an antioxidant that guards us from totally free radical damage.

B-vitamin complex – one hundred grams of ground cherries include various amounts of specific B-vitamins, including thiamine (.110 milligrams, or seven.3 percent of our RDI), riboflavin (.040 milligrams, or two percent of our RDI), and niacin (two.800 milligrams, or 14 percent of our RDI). Despite the fact that the B-vitamins work as a team, they do have particular functions: Thiamine is needed to maintain a wholesome nervous technique (and is thus nicknamed the “anti-stress” vitamin), riboflavin is needed to facilitate cell growth and fix, and niacin is necessary for DNA restore and sustaining vitality levels.

Fat loss properties – 1 a hundred gram (three.five ounce) serving of ground cherries offers us with a mere 53 calories and a single gram of excess fat. As a end result, you can freely add as a lot of of these cherries to your diet regime with no worrying about excess weight obtain. Also, like all fruits, they incorporate respectable ranges of fiber, which tends to make you come to feel fuller and significantly less inclined to overeat.

A single 100 gram serving of ground cherries also gives us with 9 milligrams of calcium (a single percent of our RDI), one milligram of iron (6 % of our RDI), 40 milligrams of phosphorous (4 % of our RDI), and 1.9 grams of protein. The cherries are also free from sodium and cholesterol, and incorporate a minimal glycemic index score, generating them appropriate for diabetic and pre-diabetic folks.

Michael Ravensthorpe is an independent writer whose investigation interests include nutrition, substitute medication, and bushcraft. He is the creator of the internet site, Spiritfoods, by way of which he promotes the world’s healthiest foods.

Ground Cherries: Sweet Small Fruits Bursting with Nutritional vitamins