Abstract
Mental health in urban environments is often treated from a healthcare provision perspective. Research in recent decades showed that mental illness in cities is a result of dysfunctional coordination between different city systems and structures. Given the nature of the city as a system of systems, this work builds through a participatory method, a general system dynamic model of factors that affect mental health in urban and regional environments. Through this method, we investigated the challenges of the application of such methodology to identify essential factors, feedback loops, and dependencies between systems to move forward in planning for mental health in cities. The outcome is a general model that showed the importance of factors that vary from individuals, families to communities and feedback loops that span multiple systems such as the city physical infrastructures, social environments, schools, labor market, and healthcare provision.
Highlights
Complexity science and systems thinking have gained more relevance in recent decades in many domains of application, including health care policy and urban planning
We investigate the application of a participatory model building approach to constructing a System dynamic (SD) model of
The approach presented in this paper showed the toughness of building a model that fits all and succeeded to a large degree to characterize aspects that are relevant to stakeholders involved
Summary
Complexity science and systems thinking have gained more relevance in recent decades in many domains of application, including health care policy and urban planning. Models and simulations provide a toolbox of investigation of the complexity (Batty and Torrens 2005). This article tackles the issues of modeling mental health in cities and urban regions. According to World Health Organization (2004) mental health is a ‘state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’. Reaching such a state proves to be challenging especially in urban environments. We investigate the application of a participatory model building approach to constructing a System dynamic (SD) model of
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