LGBT people are prone to mental illness. It’s a truth we shouldn’t shy away from | Alexander Leon

I almost didn’t write this. It wasn’t from not wanting to. I cradled my head in my hands, desperate to contribute to the reams of social media positivity I had seen surrounding Mental Health Awareness Week.

I almost didn’t – couldn’t – because I was depressed.

There came a certain point in my experience of being LGBT where I accepted that I had to be strong and uncompromising in the face of disapproving glances and withering remarks. I made a pact to throw myself into my community with zeal, no matter how exhausting, and to make full use of the privileges I was afforded in the tolerant metropolis I’d landed in.

And yet, for some reason, I find this an incredibly difficult attitude to transfer over to my struggle with depression. I will share with my co-workers that I am going on a date with a man or going to an LGBT-themed event with an almost belligerent pride, but am overwhelmed with fear in having to admit to those same people that I’m leaving slightly early to see my therapist or that I need to take some time off due to another episode.

Indeed, the word “depression” still has a bite to it, in the way that the word “gay” did when I first dared to say it to someone else in reference to myself. The tone of my voice takes on an odd quality as I approach it in a sentence, to the point where I sound intolerably meek by the time “depression” tumbles out.

The thing is, in many cases, mental illness and being queer go hand in hand. It’s an uncomfortable but important reality that LGBT youth are four times more likely to kill themselves than their heterosexual counterparts. More than half of individuals who identify as transgender experience depression or anxiety. Even among Stonewall’s own staff, people who dedicate themselves to the betterment and improved health of our community, 86% have experienced mental health issues first-hand. It’s a morbid point to make, but it makes perfect sense that we, as a community, struggle disproportionately.

At a recent event I attended, set up to train LGBT role models to visit schools and teach children about homophobia, no one explicitly mentioned their struggles with mental illness. We told one another stories of how we had come to accept ourselves in the face of adversity, talking in riddles about “dark times” or “feeling down” or being a “bit too much of a party animal”. But these problems have other names – depression, anxiety, addiction – that we consistently avoid, despite being in a community in which a large percentage of us will have undergone similar experiences.

And this phenomenon replays itself over and over. Despite there being a common understanding between me and my queer friends that we’ve probably all been vilified in the same way and made to feel a similar flavour of inadequate, we will rarely acknowledge, even within the safe boundaries of friendship, that this has had a lasting impact on our ability to maintain a healthy self-image.

But part of being proud of who we are as LGBT people is being able to be open about the struggles we’ve faced. It’s in naming and wearing the uncomfortable badges of anxiety, depression and addiction that we take the first step towards fully accepting mental illness as an important part of our collective identity. After all, how can we be true role models to the next generation if we refuse to tell the whole story?

And so, this Mental Health Awareness Week, I’m issuing a challenge to my community. If you are LGBT and suffer from a mental illness, be defiant in your acceptance of it in the same way that you would about your sexuality or gender identity. Bring it up, speak it out and feel sure that your voice, however seemingly small or insignificant, is a valid one. After all, we have been, and will always be, a community of fighters – it’s about time we dared to show our battle scars.

LGBT people are prone to mental illness. It’s a truth we shouldn’t shy away from | Alexander Leon

City-dwellers are prone to depression – are high-rises to blame?

Prof Colin Ellard was walking past the rows of new-build towers that dominate the west of central Toronto when he had a sudden realisation. “I was struck by how dark, sombre and sad these new urban canyons made me feel,” he says.

Ellard, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada who studies the impact of places on the brain and body, wanted to know why he felt like that – and if others felt the same.

His curiosity ultimately led him to conduct a series of virtual reality experiments in which he asked people to wear specialised headsets and stroll through a variety of urban environments created to test their responses. The findings, he says, proved he was not alone. Being surrounded by tall buildings produces a “substantial” negative impact on mood.

One of Tom Ryaboi’s photographs of the Toronto streets from the top of a skyscraper. Photograph: Tom Ryaboi/Barcroft Media

If proven, Ellard’s theory adds weight to existing studies finding a negative effect of high-rises on the mental health of city residents. With both government policy and the potential for greater profits driving high-density construction in cities around the world, this raises an important question for the developmentindustry.

City dwellers have a 40% increased risk of depression and double the rate of schizophrenia, according to the Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health. Ellard’s idea is that the moment to moment bad feelings he observed in the virtual reality environment can affect everyday interactions in the real world and people’s experience of living in cities.

“When people are in these very dense environments that produce oppressiveness and increase negative emotion, it seems logical that those things will spin off into the ways we understand other people and the way we treat them,” he says. “Those are the variables that are most likely to show relationships with [increased incidence of] psychiatric illness.”

This may seem a big leap but Ellard is the latest in a long line of researchers to see a link between high-rises and poor mental health. Nicholas Boys Smith, founder of built environment social enterprise Create Streets, analysed academic studies on high-rise living for his 2016 report on the design of cities. According to Boys Smith, the balance of evidence shows residents of high-rise blocks tend to suffer from more stress, mental health difficulties and neurosis, with child development particularly affected. “High-rise can work, but it’s much harder,” he says.

This all appears to cut against the urban planning orthodoxy that a certain level of density – around 30-50 homes per hectare – is necessary to make lively communities that are able to support shops, businesses and public transport. This idea is the reason the government endorsed higher density development close to transport links in February’s housing white paper.

These concerns also come up against the commercial reality in high value areas such as London, where there are more than 400 towers in the development pipeline (pdf). David Birkbeck, chief executive of housing consultant Design for Homes, says inflated land prices mean developers have little option but to go upwards to make their investment back. “Once they’ve outbid everyone for a site, height is their only way to recover the price paid,” he says.

The question is how to build densely without these negative repercussions. “The villain isn’t density itself, it’s insensitive design,” says Layla McCay, director of the Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health. “It’s about how you design in things that are protective to people’s mental health – green spaces and opportunities for social interaction.”

Some have concluded there is a density “sweet spot” (pdf) that gives the benefits of sustainable city living without the mental health costs. Proponents of mid-rise development such as that found in European cities like Vienna and Barcelona, for example, argue for buildings constructed to heights of up to eight storeys within mixed use neighbourhoods where residential buildings sit alongside shops, offices and other work spaces.

“Living at one storey is probably the most healthy thing for the human animal. But it is so much worse for the environment as a whole. That’s why we talk about the sweet spot,” says architect Jason McLennan, founder of the US-based Living Future Institute.

At the same time Boys Smith says there are signs the commercial impetus that has encouraged tower building may be altering, particularly given the recent reduction in demand for high-end housing in London. While towers are more profitable, the greater up front cost of construction makes them riskier at times when demand isn’t as strong.

Boys Smith says he is working with one large UK developer who is considering reworking unbuilt tower schemes in its pipeline using a “mid-rise” approach, and he and others promoting a mid-rise approach sense an opportunity, particularly where developers haven’t overpaid for land. Hackney council has also been promoting a similar idea for the controversial Bishopsgate Goodsyard site on the edge of the City of London, where developers Hammerson and the Ballymore group have gone back to the drawing board on earlier proposals to build seven towers of between 17 and 46 storeys.

The incoming president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, housing architect Ben Derbyshire, says many developers are already “reacting quite well” to the idea. “It’s perfectly possible at mid-rise density to design places with plenty of biodiversity, with a mix of uses and well-designed streets,” he says.

Boys Smith admits that having a home at all is the most important thing. Likewise a recent report by homelessness charity St Mungo’s shows the number of homeless people in the capital with an identified mental health need has tripled in five years. But that doesn’t make concerns about densification invalid. “It’s about finding a more humane way to house people when we do it,” says Boys Smith.

Sign up to be a Guardian Sustainable Business member and get more stories like this direct to your inbox every week. You can also follow us on Twitter.

City-dwellers are prone to depression – are high-rises to blame?

Individual athletes more prone to depression, researchers find

Athletes in individual sports are more prone to depression than those in team games, according to German research to be presented at a conference in Cardiff.

The research by the Technical University of Munich confirms not just the loneliness of the long distance runner but a range of other depressive symptoms among solo sportsmen and women more generally.

Prof Jürgen Beckmann, the university’s chair of sports psychology who will be presenting the research, said: “Individual athletes attribute failure more to themselves than team sports athletes. They take the blame more than team players. On a team there is a diffusion of responsibility, as social physiologists would say, compared with the performance of an individual athlete.”

One of the studies compared 128 young German footballers and hockey players with 71 junior athletes in a range of individual sports including swimming, speed skating and badminton.

They were assessed on a depression scale that measures symptoms such as guilt, sadness and suicidal feelings. It found that individual athletes showed significantly more signs of such symptoms than athletes in team sports.

The finding was replicated in a study of 162 senior elite athletes including many in various German national teams. Individual athletes including triathletes, golfers and cyclists were found to have higher symptoms of depression than team players in games that included volleyball, rugby and football.

The research, which is to be presented at the British Psychological Society annual sport and exercise conference in Cardiff on Monday, found that the individual athletes tend to blame themselves for sporting failure.

One of the papers to be presented suggests that individual athletes take both sporting success and failure more personally than team players. “The internal attribution could lead to stronger experiences of emotions such as pride (positive events) and guilt or shame (negative events) in athletes in individual sports,” one of the papers says.

The researchers also expected to find more signs of perfectionism among individual athletes but were surprised to discover that team players were more prone to perfectionism.

A separate long-term study found that perfectionism and chronic stress often led to burnout but not depression. Depression was found to be linked with a lack of time to recover from stress and injury.

The research found that swimmers had high prevelance rates for depressive symptoms. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

The research also found that depressive symptoms were particularly prevalent among young athletes. Beckmann said: “The real problem is with young athletes. Those who receive social support from parents and peers experience much less stress than those who don’t. That’s especially important during adolescence.

“We found that up to 20% of young athletes do have a problem with higher depression scores. In the general population its range is between 9% and 12%.

“We are not diagnosing them as being depressive, but on the depression scales they have quite a score.”

He said subsequent studies have suggested that the level could be even higher among solo athletes only. “We have very high prevalence rates in swimming, for example,” Beckmann said.

He called for more support to be given to athletes to help them recognise signs of depression and to suggest ways of tackling it.

He said: “In Germany, we have developed a burnout and screening instrument for junior athletes and a website to give them advice on coping with stress and other psychological problems they may experience.”

The mental health charity Mind said the research underlined pressures facing athletes. Hayley Jarvis, Mind’s community programmes manager for sport, said: “Following the increasing number of ex-sportspeople who have spoken out about struggles with their own mental health and some high profile suicides, Mind commissioned research to explore how sports’ governing bodies and players’ organisations currently deal with mental health, and identify best practice which can be shared with other sports.

“To help create an environment where all sports professionals can fulfil their potential, we need to see managers, coaches, clubs, governing bodies and players’ unions all support athletes to manage their mental wellbeing.”

Andy Baddeley’s story

Andy Baddeley: ‘People think admitting mental health problems makes them seem weak.’ Photograph: Michael Steele/Getty Images

Andy Baddeley, a two-time Olympian and Britain’s former No 1 1,500m runner, has blogged about his experiences of depression on the Mind website. Speaking to the Guardian, he said:

The hardest thing about running is that you are on own before a race. When things are great that’s what’s good about it. I’m not dependent on 10 other guys being on the top of their game in order for me to be successful. But there is also nothing to fall back on. The nature of athletics is that one guy gets to win each race, and so there’s 11 or more in my event who don’t. And its that unpredictability that’s the hard bit.

It got to a point with my coach when I couldn’t express how low I was. There are not many people I get to talk to about these things. I’m not surrounded by a team. I don’t have to turn up to a training ground.

I have often felt that I would be better suited to a team sport. What I enjoy most is group training, but the nature of distance running is that that doesn’t happen every day.

You’re the only one who can train hard. It is a lonely decision each day, especially when it’s cold and raining. If I plan to meet someone, I find that’s powerful in terms of motivation. And it’s the days when I am not meeting someone that it takes me a lot longer than it should to get myself out of the door. Talking to someone is what has helped me.

My mental health has been best when I’ve been meeting coaches and other team members.

Having a mental heath struggle doesn’t mean you are not mentally strong for a race. These things are separate. You can still run through the pain barrier but still have bad days – they are not mutually exclusive.

People think admitting mental health problems makes them seem weak or susceptible to being beaten. But after I wrote about my experiences I felt stronger.

I was lucky enough to see a sports psychologist when I was on lottery funding. When I was injured I saw someone privately and that helped. I deliberately chose a non-sports psychologist because I wanted more of an idea of what was normal, rather than what’s normal in elite sport.”

In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here.

Individual athletes more prone to depression, researchers find