BIG CITY BLUES

“Mounting evidence shows how city living can harm our mental health”

By: Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg

Published: Scientific American Mind; March / April 2013 issue; www.scientificamerican.com and click on mind. Alternatively, search for the following on Google: “Big City Blues, Scientific American Mind, March / April 2013 issue”. This will get you the issue and when you click on “see inside” you will get the full list of articles. Titles of articles in the online edition and the print edition are, on occasion, different (don’t ask me why) so I have provided the subtitle to help.

Level of Difficulty: ***

BEFORE YOU READ

·         Expansive Urban Green Space Provides Postive Mental Health https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rddtxO2_7s

      Green Space May Increase Mental Happiness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=299Ds43Kb4g

QUESTIONS

1.       It is implied in paragraph one that the current trend of rapid urbanization will result in…………………………………………….because…………………………………………………………………….

2.       What misconception does the writer touch upon in relation to urban migration?

3.       What two aspects of city life are now blamed for the increased incidence of mental and emotional disorders in urban environments?

4.       What is the specific finding of the Mannheim study? What is the general conclusion?

5.       Why did the writer and his colleagues feel the need to resort to MRI scans to ascertain the effects of city living?

6.       Read the 2011 study involving 32 German college students and the later study involving 70 additional test subjects. The general finding in both experiments is significant because………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

7.       What social problem is also connected to an overactive amygdale?

8.       What does “This finding” in the sentence “This finding was not a total surprise” refer to?

9.       The discovery concerning pACC is significant in terms of the treatment of schizophrenia because ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

10.   What effect does city living have on the brains of urbanites?

11.   The study conducted by Lisa Feldman Barret and her colleagues proved that …………………They based this conclusion on the fact that ……………………………………………………………………………………

12.   What is the ultimate significance of all the studies recounted in this text? They indicate that…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

WRITING TASK: CAUSE ANALYSIS ESSAY

Use the information you gleaned from the text and your own experience to discuss the causes of “The Big City Blues”. Remember the purpose of your essay is to pinpoint causes so that depression, anxiety and mental illness can, in future, be prevented before it happens. The causes as indicated in the text are as follows:

·         Greater competition

·         Weaker community ties

·         Environmental factors (noise, lack of green space)

In your conclusion, you can suggest designing cities better so as to prevent depression, anxiety and mental illness. Suggest concrete solutions

BIG CITY BLUES KEY AND TEACHER’S NOTES

This text covers a very familiar problem yet due to its source, it provides the opportunity to introduce students to real comprehension questions. Like all articles out of this magazine, it is stylistically and organizationally very good indeed; a feature which is worth analyzing. It is a little bit of a hassle finding some Scientific American Mind texts because for some inexplicable reason an article in the print edition may be published under a different name in the online edition; don’t ask me why. The writer and subtitle remain the same though so I have provided them. Another thing that happens is that an article which you have to pay for may later become free. I will be adding links to all these articles over the next couple of weeks.

1.       Stupendous changes; it brought about the Renaissance, the industrial revolution and globalization in the past.

2.       That it is a trade up.

3.       Greater competition and weaker community ties

4.       The social strain of urban living engages specific stress circuits in the brain; circuits known to go awry in mood disorders and other mental illnesses; Social stress is especially harmful.

5.       Because other research relies on a coarse metric: the frequency of clinically diagnosed psychiatric patients.

6.       An amygdale in high gear is also observed in patients suffering from depression and anxiety.

7.       Violence

8.       Subjects who spent the most time growing up in cities showed the highest levels of p ACC activity under pressure.

9.       If the adult were sheltered from social strain, the pACC might never be damaged (and would thus not fail to quell the….)

10.   The longer a person lives in a city, the less communication occurs between their amygdale and pACC.

11.   A close network of friends and family can insulate us from the most damaging effects of stress; the hormone resopressin reduces activity in areas of the cingulate cortex including the pACC and boosts feedback to the amygdale.

12.   We might take aim at the real goal of psychiatry which is to prevent serious emotional disorders not just treat them.