This tracks, specially because the most depressing place, the suburbs, is chock-full of cars
I don’t drive but I live on a four lane road in front of trafic light and beyond particles, for me it’s a combination of multiple things, all from cars.
There’s the pollution from the combustion particles, but the noise is also a significant source of stress. From the young dudes that want to impress and rev their engines, to the huge trucks with trailers, they are all noisy and it makes it impossible to keep the windows open. Even the electric cars are noisy. Some of them sound like they are constantly honking at low volume. Plus, their tires are also making that white noise when they move at a certain speed, and they also shed microplastics.
And then because we don’t have emergency lanes, there are several emergency vehicles passing in front of my apartment multiple times a day, sirens blasting and honking at cars stuck in trafic.
Also, the visual aspect of a car sewer makes me depressed. Seeing them everywhere. A sea of cars in cities, but also deep in nature.
Last year I visited a few Carribean islands and all of them were choked by cars. Want to take a hike? Just get a car, there’s a parking on the top of the volcano.
The article ends on the note that electric cars will at least help with the pollution from combustion particles, which is good. But the noise and the sea of cars will remain, they’ll just be electric.
Now we finally know why so many city dwellers are depressed — and no, it’s not because of your failing local sports teams.
A new study from King’s College of London found that even tiny increases in vehicle emissions in highly polluted neighborhoods were correlated with shockingly high rates of clinical depression among residents — even when the researchers controlled for common environmental contributors to mental health conditions, like lack of access to mood-boosting green space or substandard housing.
Though all the regions the researchers studied had high rates of vehicle-related pollution, people who lived in neighborhoods that had just 3 micrograms of nitrogen dioxide more per cubic meter had a stunning 39 percent higher risk of a depression diagnosis, when compared with the residents of neighborhoods with the lowest levels of NO2, which is commonly found in diesel exhaust emitted by heavy trucks.
…
Did they adjust for ability to access medical care?
Study: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00127-020-01966-x
Abstract
Purpose The World Health Organisation (WHO) recently ranked air pollution as the major environmental cause of premature death. However, the significant potential health and societal costs of poor mental health in relation to air quality are not represented in the WHO report due to limited evidence. We aimed to test the hypothesis that long-term exposure to air pollution is associated with poor mental health.
Methods A prospective longitudinal population-based mental health survey was conducted of 1698 adults living in 1075 households in South East London, from 2008 to 2013. High-resolution quarterly average air pollution concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and oxides (NOx), ozone (O3), particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter < 10 μm (PM10) and < 2.5 μm (PM2.5) were linked to the home addresses of the study participants. Associations with mental health were analysed with the use of multilevel generalised linear models, after adjusting for large number of confounders, including the individuals’ socioeconomic position and exposure to road-traffic noise.
Results We found robust evidence for interquartile range increases in PM2.5, NOx and NO2 to be associated with 18–39% increased odds of common mental disorders, 19–30% increased odds of poor physical symptoms and 33% of psychotic experiences only for PM10. These longitudinal associations were more pronounced in the subset of non-movers for NO2 and NOx.
Conclusions The findings suggest that traffic-related air pollution is adversely affecting mental health. Whilst causation cannot be proved, this work suggests substantial morbidity from mental disorders could be avoided with improved air quality.
Okay so it’s a survey not just based on diagnosis statistics. This is also just a correlation but it’s a very reasonably-studied one in this case.
If pollutants are the primary driver of adverse mental health outcomes, I’d expect to see Beijing be a never ending parade of people jumping from buildings. Given that’s not the case, I wonder if there is a maximum effect of pollution, or if it just happens to be a correlation
Cars cause a lot of adverse effects. I live right near a road that is entirely too fast. It has a direct effect on my mental health in that it means I can’t open my window due to noise. I can’t easily walk anywhere because half the places I could walk are cut off by a fast and busy road. Anecdotally I’d feel like noise and loss of mobility from nearby roads would have a more substantial effect on mental health, and it doesn’t seem like the study did anything to isolate the different variables caused by cars
