Thu Jul 17

Is our mental health determined by where we live – or is it the other way round? New research sheds more light

Written by: Matthew Hobbs, Associate Professor and Transforming Lives Fellow, Spatial Data Science and Planetary Health, Sheffield Hallam University

Ever felt like where you live is having an impact on your mental health? Turns out, you’re not imagining things.

Our new analysis ^[1] of eight years of data from the New Zealand Attitude and Values Study ^[2] found how often we move and where we live are intertwined with our mental health.

In some respects, this finding might seem obvious. Does a person feel the same living in a walkable and leafy suburb with parks and stable neighbours as they would in a more transient neighbourhood with few local services and busy highways?

Probably not. The built and natural environment shapes how safe, supported and settled a person feels.

We wanted to know to what extent a person’s mental health is shaped by where they live – and to what degree a person’s mental health determines where they end up living.

Patterns over time

Most research on the environmental influences on mental health gives us a snapshot of people’s lives at a single point in time. That’s useful, but it doesn’t show how things change over time or how the past may affect the future.

Our study took a slightly different approach. By tracking the same people year after year, we looked at patterns over time: how their mental health shifted, whether they moved house, their access to positive and negative environmental features, and how the areas they lived in changed when it came to factors such as poverty, unemployment and overcrowding.

An example of what neighbourhoods can look like showing health-promoting (in green) and health-constraining ( purple and pink) areas in Auckland neighbourhoods. Lukas Marek, Author provided (no reuse)

We also looked at things like age, body size and how much people exercised, all of which can influence mental health, too.

To make sense of such complex and interconnected data, we turned to modern machine learning tools – in particular Random Forest algorithms ^[3]. These tools allowed us to build a lot of individual models (trees) looking at how various factors affect mental health.

We could then see which factors come up most often to evaluate both their relative importance and the likely extent of their influence.

We also ran Monte Carlo simulations ^[4]. Think of these like a high-tech crystal ball, to explore what might happen to mental health over time if neighbourhood conditions improved.

These simulations produced multiple future scenarios with better neighbourhood conditions, used Random Forest to forecast mental health outcomes in each, and then averaged the results.

A negative feedback loop

What we uncovered was a potential negative feedback loop. People who had depression or anxiety were more likely to move house, and those who moved were, on average, more likely to experience worsening mental health later on.

And there’s more. People with persistent mental health issues weren’t just moving more often, they were also more likely to move into a more deprived area. In other words, poorer mental health was related to a higher likelihood of ending up in places where resources were scarcer and the risk of ongoing stress was potentially higher.

Our study was unable to say why the moves occurred, but it may be that mental health challenges were related to unstable housing, financial strain, or the need for a fresh start. Our future research will try to unpick some of this.

On the flip side, people who didn’t relocate as often, especially those in lower-deprivation areas, tended to have better long-term mental health. So, stability matters. So does the neighbourhood.

Where we live matters

These findings challenge the idea that mental health is just about what’s inside us. Where we live plays a key role in shaping how we feel. But it’s not just that our environment affects our minds. Our minds can also steer us into different environments, too.

Our study shows that mental health and place are potentially locked in a feedback loop. One influences the other and the cycle can either support wellbeing or drive decline.

That has real implications for how we support people with mental health challenges.

In this study, if a person was already struggling, they were more likely to move and more likely to end up somewhere that made life harder.

This isn’t just about individual choice. It’s about the systems we’ve built, housing markets, income inequality, access to care and more. If we want better mental health at a population level, we need to think beyond the individual level. We need to think about place.

Because in the end, mental health doesn’t just live in the mind; it’s also rooted in the places we live.