ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Evidence and theory for lower rates of depression in larger US urban areas.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed.
- Urban and Rural Differences in the Efficacy of a Mobile Health Depression Treatment for Young Adults.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2024Trial
- Implicit biases change more slowly in larger cities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Urbanization compound pathways of global lung cancer incidence risk under proximal and distal interactions.iScience · 2026Article
- A study on the coupling mechanism between the urban environment and depression perception based on deep learning and street view image.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Article
- Painful Disorders of Gut-Brain Interaction Are More Associated With Worse Health-Related Quality of Life and Psychological Disorders Than Non-Painful Disorders in Latin American Countries.Neurogastroenterology and motility · 2025Article
- Declining subjective well-being disparities concurrent with urbanization in China.National science review · 2025Article
- CHARLS insights into the impact of dual interactions of chronic diseases on depression in middle-aged and elderly individuals.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The influence of credits and stigmas in volunteering on depression, the modulating effects of volunteer personality and motivation.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Prediction of late-onset depression in the elderly Korean population using machine learning algorithms.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Can working in agriculture have a favorable effect on depressive symptoms? Life satisfaction as a mediator.PloS one · 2025Article
- The U-shape Association between Population Agglomeration and Individual Depression: the Role of Dialect Diversity.Journal of urban health : bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine · 2024Article
- Built Environment, Natural Environment, and Mental Health.GeoHealth · 2024Article
- Implicit racial biases are lower in more populous more diverse and less segregated US cities.Nature communications · 2024Article
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- Article
- General and Specific Factors of Environmental Stress and Their Associations With Brain Structure and Dimensions of Psychopathology.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2023Article
- Mental Health of the Russian Federation Population versus Regional Living Conditions and Individual Income.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Article
- Higher depression risks in medium- than in high-density urban form across Denmark.Science advances · 2023Article
- The Prevalence of Depression Symptoms and Their Socioeconomic and Health Predictors in a Local Community with a High Deprivation: A Cross-Sectional Studies.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
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7 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It is commonly assumed that cities are detrimental to mental health. However, the evidence remains inconsistent and at most, makes the case for differences between rural and urban environments as a whole. Here, we propose a model of depression driven by an individual's accumulated experience mediated by social networks. The connection between observed systematic variations in socioeconomic networks and built environments with city size provides a link between urbanization and mental health. Surprisingly, this model predicts lower depression rates in larger cities. We confirm this prediction for US cities using four independent datasets. These results are consistent with other behaviors associated with denser socioeconomic networks and suggest that larger cities provide a buffer against depression. This approach introduces a systematic framework for conceptualizing and modeling mental health in complex physical and social networks, producing testable predictions for environmental and social determinants of mental health also applicable to other psychopathologies.
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