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

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Sociology of Mental Health

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Abstract

The two decade history of the ASA Section on the Sociology of Mental Health has coincided with a period of tremendous resurgence in the study of how neighborhoods and local places contribute to mental health—a topic that has become a popular focus for mental health sociologists. In considering the sociological contributions to this area of study, the present chapter has two aims. The first aim is to provide the reader with an appreciation of sociological research on local places and mental health. To achieve this, I discuss some important 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. The second aim is to discuss future directions for research. In doing so, I identify several key conceptual and substantive issues that I argue are important for advancing sociology of mental health research on the consequences of local places—for mental and physical health.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For readers looking for such reviews, there are many from which to choose—written by sociologists and scholars from other disciplines—that focus on health in general (e.g., Robert 1999), mental health (Hill and Maimon 2012), neighborhood effects research in general (Sampson et al. 2002) and life course issues regarding neighborhood health effects (Robert et al. 2010).

  2. 2.

    To be sure, this is a tricky task given that (a) research on neighborhood health effects is a multi-disciplinary enterprise with other fields (most notably social epidemiology) commonly utilizing sociological concepts and theories and (b) sociologists publish this research in a variety of social science, public health, and psychiatry journals. Therefore, unlike a standard review article that aims to survey an entire area in breadth and depth, my historical overview and assessment of the field in terms of sociological emphases and contributions is heavily informed by scholarship published in the leading journals for medical sociologists, such as the Journal of Health and Social Behavior and Social Science and Medicine, as such forums are places for research that explicitly applies or informs sociological approaches to mental health. Furthermore, the high status of these forums is indicative of how scholars from sociology and other disciplines look to these sources for leading sociological ideas to inform their own work. Lastly, I intentionally exclude studies focused on rural-urban differences in mental health as well as the mental health effects of crowding, as such topics are outside the scope of this chapter.

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Acknowledgments

I authored this work while receiving funding from Investigator Awards from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. I express sincere thanks to Stephanie Robert and Margaret Weden, who through many fruitful e-mail exchanges on this topic facilitated some of my thinking in preparing several parts of this chapter (whether they realize it or not). All the assertions and conclusions as well as any errors and omissions in this chapter, however, are solely my own.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Richard M. Carpiano

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Correspondence to Richard M. Carpiano .

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, USA

    Robert J. Johnson

  2. Department of Sociology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA

    R. Jay Turner

  3. Columbia University, New York, New York, USA

    Bruce G. Link

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Carpiano, R.M. (2014). The Neighborhood and Mental Life: Past, Present, and Future Sociological Directions in Studying Community Context and Mental Health. In: Johnson, R., Turner, R., Link, B. (eds) Sociology of Mental Health. SpringerBriefs in Sociology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07797-0_5

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