Title: A Mayor’s Depression: Do mental health disorders scale with city size?

Abstract:

A prominent topic in complexity science is the question whether phenomena scale with size. Initially applied to biological phenomena like metabolism and body volume of animals, it was further used to assess cities. This work documented how cities both generates virtue (innovation, wealth) and vice (criminality, pollution). In this project we applied the scaling technique to mental health disorders to see whether they would scale with city size. In an increasingly urbanized world, it is important to understand what city life does to our mental wellbeing. To study this we analysed 15K participants that had city and mental health information available. Our preliminary analysis suggests a linear scaling of various mental health variables. This indicates that as city size doubles, the cases of e.g. depression also double. If these results are maintained in our final analyses, they suggest that city dynamics are not related to mental disorders.