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Challenges and future directions for investigating the effects of urbanicity on mental health

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This Comment proposes to increase knowledge of the effects of urbanicity on brain and mental health by linking existing human spatial data with macroenvironmental and regional socioeconomic data. It introduces hypothesis-free models to capture the data and model life in the city and suggests refinements for future studies into conditions that will soon affect the majority of the earth’s population.

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Fig. 1: Proposed pathways towards enriching existing data sources with macro- and microenvironmental data to improve knowledge of the effects of urbanicity on mental health.

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Acknowledgements

The author is writing this Comment on behalf of the environMENTAL consortium. This work has received funding from the European Union. Complementary funding was received by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee (10041392 and 10038599). Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HADEA). Neither the European Union nor HADEA can be held responsible for them.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Population Neuroscience and Stratified Medicine, Department of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, CCM, Charite University Medicine Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Gunter Schumann

  2. Centre for Population Neuroscience and Stratified Medicine, Institute for Science and Technology of Brain-Inspired Intelligence, Fudan University, Shanghai, P. R. China

    Gunter Schumann

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  1. Gunter Schumann
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Correspondence to Gunter Schumann.

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Schumann, G. Challenges and future directions for investigating the effects of urbanicity on mental health. Nat. Mental Health 1, 817–819 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-023-00147-4

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