Study: City life can make you crazy

Between the crowds and the noise and the pressure, city life often seems to set one’s brain on edge. Turns out that could literally be true. A study of German college students suggests that urbanite brains are more susceptible to stress, particularly social stress, than those of country dwellers. Meyer-Lindenberg’s findings, published June 23 in Nature, are a neurological investigation into the underpinnings of a disturbing social trend: As a rule, city life seems to generate mental illness. Compared to their rural counterparts, city dwellers have higher levels of anxiety and mood disorders. The schizophrenia risk of people raised in cities is almost double. Literature on the effect is so thorough that researchers say it’s not just correlation, as might be expected if anxious people preferred to live in cities. Neither is it a result of heredity. It’s a cause-and-effect relationship between environment and mind...more