Abstract
Circumstances of living are key to shaping emotional and affective experiences, long term health, wellbeing and opportunities. In an era characterised by rapid urbanisation across the majority of the world, there is increasing interest in the interaction between mental health and urban environments, but insufficient attention is paid to how mental health is situated in space and time. Socio-economic inequalities are prevalent in many urban environments globally, making conditions of living highly precarious for some social groups including young people. There remains a large volume of unmet mental health service needs, and young people are impacted by uncertain economic futures. The purpose of this scoping review is to develop an interdisciplinary and globally-informed understanding of the urban conditions which affect youth mental health across a range of scales, and to identify protective factors which can promote better youth mental health. We seek to broaden the scope of urban mental health research beyond the physical features of urban environments to develop an interpretive framework based on perspectives shared by young people. We illustrate how concepts from social theory can be used as an integrative framework to emphasise both young people's lived experiences and the wider cultural and political dynamics of urban mental health.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 115619 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | Social Science and Medicine |
| Volume | 320 |
| Early online date | 21 Dec 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Mar 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:For example, poor environmental quality is framed by several papers as a core constituent of ‘urban stress’, including population density, noise from traffic and industry, poor sanitation, water and air quality (Salgado et al., 2020), limited access to nature and open spaces; built environment and urban sprawl (Taylor et al., 2016; Hoare et al., 2019; Baumann et al., 2020; Krabbendam et al., 2020), housing features and land-use mix (Gong et al., 2016). But the evidence to support many of these features of urban environments as causal explanations is equivocal (Min and Min, 2018; Moore et al., 2018; Van den Bosch and Sang, 2017). These environmental studies tend to focus on immediate physical environments. This often carriers over into studies of the organisation of social environments in which the ecology of the neighbourhood is often seen as an important unit of analysis. Neighbourhoods have been described by Berry (Berry, 2007: 222) as sites for “concentrated disadvantage”, which encompasses sociodemographic disadvantage and physical and social “incivilities” (223, see also Taylor et al., 2016). Exposure to these incivilities is said to increase the risks of poor mental health by compromising the sense of security – a theme highlighted by our youth advisors as a key part of feeling in control (see section 3.1).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Authors
Keywords
- cities
- inequalities
- interdisciplinarity
- mental health
- scoping review
- social model
- Social theory
- youth
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Health(social science)
- History and Philosophy of Science
