Urbanization and Mental Health: A Comparative Perspective

Urbanization restructures social relationships and alters the norms and values of a society. It is associated with many positive and negative impacts. In the sociological literature, Durkheim was a pioneer in advancing our understanding of suicide shaped by social relationships. The theory of ‘anomie,’ which incorporates both integration and moral regulation of society, is the most familiar theory to social scientists outside sociology. Be it suicide, homicide, violence, crime, or mental health, all of them cannot be looked upon in isolation. Sociological theories, such as anomie, provide a broad understanding of the macro-level social processes that influence the complexities of mental health. Further, as Durkheim was an empirical sociologist, the rates at which such problems are occurring in any society are an important aspect of social reality. From this perspective, official statistics and surveys provide immense insights and understanding of the magnitude of a mental health problem. How the problem is defined, categorized, measured, and counted in different countries by the disaggregated characteristics such as gender, age groups, marital status, caste groups, and religion, and by rural and urban status, etc. This session will help to understand the nature of the relationship between urbanization and mental health, its measurement, and data, as well as its limitations at the aggregate level, and will throw light on the sociological conditions unleashed by the forces of urbanization in shaping the prevalence and differentials in mental health problems across the world.