Toward dynamic urban environmental exposure assessments in mental health research

Abstract

It is increasingly recognized that mental disorders are affected by both personal characteristics and environmental exposures. The built, natural, and social environments can either contribute to or buffer against metal disorders. Environmental exposure assessments related to mental health typically rely on neighborhoods within which people currently live. In this article, I call into question such neighborhood-based exposure assessments at one point in time, because human life unfolds over space and across time. To circumvent inappropriate exposure assessments and to better grasp the etiologies of mental disease, I argue that people are exposed to multiple health-supporting and harmful exposures not only during their daily lives, but also over the course of their lives. This article aims to lay a theoretical foundation elucidating the impact of dynamic environmental exposures on mental health outcomes. I examine, first, the possibilities and challenges for mental health research to integrate people's environmental exposures along their daily paths and, second, how exposures over people's residential history might affect mental health later in life. To push the borders of scientific inquiries, I stress that only such mobility-based approaches facilitate an exploration of exposure duration, exposure sequences, and exposure accumulation.

Remote Sensing in Environmental Justice Research—A Review

“…Scale in environmental analyses is not only a matter of space but also a matter of time (for discussion see [188]) making it indispensable to include spatial as well as temporal scales of exposure into the analyses. For instance, while some environmental stressors pose a risk only during short periods of time, others influence human health over extended periods of time.…”

“…The accumulating effects of different neighborhood influences can only be investigated when using longitudinal data and time series of environmental characteristics [186]. Therefore, in order to paint a holistic picture about the environmental influences on health, it is relevant to also integrate human mobility into the analyses [188].…”

More green space is related to less antidepressant prescription rates in the Netherlands: A Bayesian geoadditive quantile regression approach

“…Interest among both researchers and health policymakers in the mental health pathway of environmental exposure has grown substantially [1][2][3][4][5]. One reason for this is that neuropsychiatric conditions, such as depression, are now among the leading disease burdens globally [6,7].…”

Spatial Analysis of Moments of Stress Derived from Wearable Sensor Data

“…Mood and anxiety disorders are more prevalent amongst city dwellers, so mental health is negatively affected by urban life (Lederbogen et al, 2011). For instance, people might experience emotional responses during their daily activities in the urban environment (Layeb & Hussein, 2016;Knöll et al, 2018;Helbich, 2018). Residents and city users are exposed to pollution, crowded areas, extreme temperature, degraded landscapes, a high level of noise, etc.…”

“…Researchers have investigated stress in correlation with traffic load, noise and environmental pollution (Birenboim et al, 2019;Knöll et al, 2018). Some research efforts investigated the restorative influence of the natural environment, such as green and blue spaces, on mental stress (Helbich, 2018;Ulrich et al, 1991;Birenboim et al, 2019). However, they still endeavour to better understand the specific environmental elements that cause urban stress.…”