Mental health, migration and the megacity: Urban transformation in China

HealthSociety

Mental health, migration and the megacity: Urban transformation in China

Research has identified key phenomena that ties mental illness and the social lives of cities together: among the factors most consistently identified are migration, density and stress; migrants into cities bear a disproportionately large share of the burden of urban mental illness; dense living conditions exacerbate the problem; and the general stress and precarity of urban living create the psycho-social basis for the development of clinical problems.

This project is under the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) umbrella programme, Urban Transformations (coordinated by Oxford University) and a sub project within our Urban Brain lab.

Aims

The series of interdisciplinary and comparative questions which were addressed are:

How does a complex intertwining of biological, psychological and sociological factors result in the relationship between urbanicity and mental illness?
What are the consequences of the specific sociology of Shanghai for the mental health of its citizens?

Answering these questions will allow us to untangle and counter the relations between migration, poverty and inter-generational cycles of poor mental health.

Methods

The project was composed of four work packages:

Understanding migrants mental health in contemporary Shanghai through systematic review and synthesis of literature
Developing nuanced understanding of Shanghai migrants’ daily life experience and how it relates to mental health issues through ethnographic field work
Constructing a sociological deep surveying instrument for mapping migrant mental health in Shanghai by combining knowledge from the first two work packages
Using biological and mobile technologies to measure stress (cortisol awakening response and daily profile), and the daily urban materialities surrounding migrants.