The Neighborhood and Mental Life: Past, Present, and Future Sociological Directions in Studying Community Context and Mental Health

Abstract

In the following pages, I will provide an overview of the past, current, and potential future contributions of sociology to understanding the mental health implications of local community life. This chapter has two aims. The first aim is to provide the reader with an appreciation of research on local places and mental health. To achieve this, I map the genealogy of ideas in this research area—discussing research streams of sociological inquiry on local places and mental health over the past 20 years as well as seminal scholarship that dates back to the start of sociology as a formal discipline. In doing so, I intentionally avoid in-depth discussion of specific research findings as many extensive reviews already exist, and limit my focus whenever possible to contributions from sociological research versus research in geography, epidemiology, psychology, community and social psychiatry, public health, and other disciplines. The second aim is to discuss future directions for research. For this, I build upon ideas reviewed in the historical overview in order to identify several key conceptual and substantive issues that are important for advancing sociology of mental health research on the consequences of local places. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)