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More than jobs and houses: mental health, quality of life and the perceptions of locality in an area undergoing urban regeneration

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Abstract

Background

Urban regeneration initiatives are considered to be one means of making a contribution to improving people’s quality of life and mental health. This paper considers the relationship between lay perceptions of locality adversity, mental health and social capital in an area undergoing urban regeneration.

Methods

Using qualitative methods as part of a larger multi-method study, perceptions of material, and non-material aspects of the locality and the way in which people vulnerable to mental health problems coped with living in adversity were identified as being more highly valued than intended or actual changes to structural elements such as the provision of housing or employment.

Results

Themes derived from narrative accounts included concerns about the absence of social control in the locality, the reputation of the area, a lack of faith in local agencies to make changes considered important to local residents, a reliance on personal coping strategies to manage adversity and perceived threats to mental health which reinforced a sense of social isolation. We suggest these elements are implicated in restricting opportunities and enhancing feelings of ‘entrapment’ contributing to low levels of local collective efficacy. The gap between social capital capacity at an individual level and links with collective community resources may in part have accounted for the absence of improvements in mental health during the early life of the urban regeneration initiative.

Implications/conclusions

In order to enhance quality of life or mental health, agencies involved in urban initiatives need as a basic minimum to promote security, increase leisure opportunities, and improve the image of the locality.

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Notes

  1. Traditional ‘structural’ approaches to mental health inequalities such as the community studies of the impact of the environment on mental health conducted in the 1950s and 1960s (e.g. [10, 15]) suggested links between social conditions and disadvantage (e.g. unemployment, poverty and racism) and psychiatric morbidity. Recent research into the prevalence of mental disorder amongst women and impact of employment, unemployment and standard of living point to the importance of macro-structural variables and environmental causes in determining mental health [20, 24, 28, 31].

  2. Psycho-socially orientated perspectives are concerned with changes in and experience of life events, the social world of individuals and the way in which social environmental demands generate psychological stress [3, 18].

  3. The main measures used in the study are measures of mental health—the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) (Goldberg 1978) [7] and the Clinical Interview Schedule - Research version (CIS-R) (Lewis et al. 1992) [30].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Primary Care Research and Development Centre, University of Manchester, 5th Floor Williamson Building, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK

    Anne Rogers & Claire Gately

  2. School of Human Sciences, Dept. of Applied Social Sciences, University of Swansea, Swansea, UK

    Peter Huxley & Sherrill Evans

Authors
  1. Anne Rogers
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  2. Peter Huxley
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  3. Sherrill Evans
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  4. Claire Gately
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Correspondence to Anne Rogers.

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Rogers, A., Huxley, P., Evans, S. et al. More than jobs and houses: mental health, quality of life and the perceptions of locality in an area undergoing urban regeneration. Soc Psychiat Epidemiol 43, 364–372 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-008-0316-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-008-0316-2

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