Living near a green space provides lifelong mental health protection
It is one thing to know that the surroundings we live in affect our sense of wellbeing. Quite another to learn that the mental health of an eighty-year old is influenced by the address where he or she lived as a child. Scottish demographer Jamie Pearce describes this previously unsuspected link as “among the most fascinating results” of his recent research. His study data reveal one neighborhood feature that is especially important for mental health: the availability of green space.
20 April, 2018
Pearce was in Madrid this week to take part in the Demography Today lecture series, with a talk titled “Life Course of Place: A Geographical Approach to Understanding Mental Health and Cognitive Ageing.”
Pearce is Professor of Health Geography at the University of Edinburgh, where he is co-director of the Centre for Research on Environment, Society and Health, and director of the Scottish Graduate School for Social Science. His research pursues an understanding of how much the place we live in shapes our day-to-day decisions, in order, ultimately, that we can “learn to build the best possible environment for everyone,” he remarked in an interview before the talk.
He provides some examples. The decision whether or not to start smoking depends in part on the number of tobacco outlets in a person’s neighborhood, or whether they see a lot of cigarette adverts. A similar thing occurs with physical activity, with neighbors likelier to exercise if there is a park nearby. This kind of environmental factor intervenes more in our behavior – Pearce explains – than more explicit messages of, for instance, awareness campaigns.
“There are still a lot of smokers around, even though everyone knows that smoking is bad for your health,” he elaborates; “the fault does not lie with any lack of information.”
Jamie Pearce, lecturer of the ‘Demography Today’ series.
In order to clarify which aspects of a neighborhood influence us most and how, the project team decided to delve into what is a demographer’s treasure chest: a cohort of tens of thousands of people born in 1936 in the area around Edinburgh, who at age 11 had taken the intelligence tests designed for the region’s children. Around 800 surviving members of this Lothian Cohort were recontacted at the start of the 21st century.
Three years ago, Pearce and his colleagues asked members of the Lothian Cohort to provide information on their addresses throughout their lives, and later made an assessment of their mental health. To the team’s astonishment, a clear linkage emerged between the postcodes of these eighty-year-olds’ childhood homes and their cognitive and mental health. Especially among those growing up in low-income families, the availability of green space near their place of residence was associated with a lower likelihood of suffering conditions like anxiety and depression, and also with good cognitive ability.
Why this linkage? What is the connection between visiting a park in childhood and the mental health of the aged adult? Pearce does not offer a firm answer, but stresses that “childhood is a formative period” and “everything that happens then influences our adult lives.” It is not feasible to ask an eighty-year-old how often they visited a park in childhood, or if they played there alone or with friends. But what we do know, thanks to studies in adults, is that the advantage of green spaces comes not only from the opportunity to be more physically active. Nature, it seems, has intrinsic benefits for mental health.