Study shows lower rates of depression in big U.S. cities

CHICAGO

The pandemic has urged some city dwellers to leave urbanity in favor of locales with more space, including rural areas.

But a new University of Chicago study may have folks rethinking making moves. Marc Berman, associate professor in the department of psychology, co-authored the work that predicts lower depression rates among people in cities due to the social, socioeconomic and infrastructure networks found there. Those same networks can lead to rapid increases in social interaction and higher rates of innovation and wealth production.

“With a lot of earlier works, there was this kind of romantic notion that more rural and less populated areas were happier and mentally healthy. And this study really counters that. Actually, when we look at the data, we don’t see that,” Berman said.

Berman and his research team used prepandemic data sets derived from the U.S. Census and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in approximately 80 U.S. cities that range in population from 40,000 to 10 million to come up with the study’s results. The largest data set was a Twitter one from 2019 that used 80 tweets per user as a depression inventory, to quantify how depressed a Twitter user was.

“We analyzed four independent data sets, which allow for consistent assessments of cases of depression across different urban areas in the United States,” Berman said. “Everybody thinks that bigger cities have more crime, more stress, maybe people are more cold or callous and that would seem to suggest that you get more mental illness or more depression as cities get bigger and we found just the opposite.”