A System of Systems of Mental Health in Cities, Digging Deep into the Origins of Complexity

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.