Urbanization and Mental Health in China: Linking the 2010 Population Census with a Cross-Sectional Survey.

Juan Chen,Pierre Landry,Shuo Chen

doi:10.3390/ijerph120809012

Abstract

Along with the rapid urbanization in China, the state of mental health also receives growing attention. Empirical measures, however, have not been developed to assess the impact of urbanization on mental health and the dramatic spatial variations. Innovatively linking the 2010 Chinese Population Census with a 2011 national survey of urban residents, we first assess the impact of urbanization on depressive symptoms measured by the Center of Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) of 1288 survey respondents. We then retrieve county-level characteristics from the 2010 Chinese Population Census that match the individual characteristics in the survey, so as to create a profile of the “average person” for each of the 2869 counties or city districts, and predict a county-specific CES-D score. We use this county-specific CES-D score to compute the CES-D score for the urban population at the prefectural level, and to demonstrate the dramatic spatial variations in urbanization and mental health across China: highly populated cities along the eastern coast such as Shenyang and Shanghai show high CES-D scores, as do cities in western China with high population density and a high proportion of educated ethnic minorities.

Highlights

The state of mental health in China has received growing attention in the past decade due to the increase in the population’s economic and societal stress [1,2]
2010 Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study, Yang et al provide clear evidence of the prominence of mental disorders among public health concerns in China: mental and behavioral disorders accounted for 9.5% of all disability-adjusted life-years and 23.6% of all years lived with disability (YLD); seven of the top 20 causes of YLD were mental disorders, with major depressive disorder highest on the list [5]
We first randomly selected 26 primary sampling units (PSUs), which are cells of spatial grids defined as half square degrees (HSDs) of latitude and longitude, within strata from a spatial sampling frame of China taken by our partners at Research Center for Contemporary China (RCCC)

Summary

Introduction

The state of mental health in China has received growing attention in the past decade due to the increase in the population’s economic and societal stress [1,2]. According to the psychiatric epidemiological surveys conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2001–2002, the estimated prevalence of mental disorders in the preceding year in two Chinese cities—9.1% in Beijing and 4.3% in Shanghai—was still considerably lower than that of other countries (e.g., 18.4% in France, 26.4% in the United States) [3]. In four provinces in China showed the adjusted one-month prevalence of any mental disorder was 17.5%; of mood disorders, 6.1%; and of anxiety disorders, 5.6% [4]. In their recent report on the results of the. Of the 440 million people who account for the urban growth since 1979, about half are rural-to-urban migrants and the rest are in-situ urbanized rural residents [9,10]

Methods

Results

Conclusion