At the Centre for Urban Mental Health, researchers from different fields use the tools of complexity science to identify new pathways to improve mental health in the city.
Our mission is to find new pathways that can be targeted with interventions to improve urban mental health that take into account the complexity and dynamics of mental health problems and mental health disorders in an urban environment.
Urban living is on the rise: for the first time in history, more than 50 percent of the world’s population lives in urban areas. And this number is expected to rise to 66 percent by 2050.
Urban environments are economically attractive and exciting, but can also be more challenging and stressful than rural environments (‘urban stress’).
Urban Mental Health (UMH) is one of the Research Priority Areas of the University of Amsterdam. The Centre for Urban Mental Health is embedded within three faculties.
It is unified by the emerging knowledge and skills from the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, the Faculty of Medicine, and the Faculty of Science, together with the Institute for Advanced Study. This collaboration brings together unique multidisciplinary research teams and stakeholders from the Amsterdam region.
At the Centre for Urban Mental Health, we use state-of-the art complexity science to understand the dynamics of mental health problems in an urban environment. Why do some groups or individuals thrive in an urban setting, whereas others are more vulnerable and develop mental problems? We pay special attention to common mental health problems: depression, anxiety and addiction.
Find out more about our UMH Position paper that was published in Lancet Psychiatry in 2021.
Figure: Conceptual framework of the relationship between factors in the urban environment and common mental disorder outcomes
This framework conceptualises urban mental health phenomena from a complex systems perspective. Meta factors (grey box) listed on the left are considered to have a dynamic impact on the urban environment and its inhabitants at large. Factors are categorized as urban factors (blue box; e.g. air pollution or built environment), social factors (green box; e.g. social cohesion) or individual factors (yellow box; e.g. individual demographic, psychological, or neurobiological characteristics). Oscillating arrows between the factors and common mental disorder (CMD) symptoms signify the different temporal scales across which factors can assert their effect. CMDs are represented as symptom clusters (red circle) connected by bridge symptoms. Feedback arrows represent the possibility of feedback from CMD symptoms to explanatory factors, which can also occur over different timescales.