Mental illness is a major public health problem. Recent research found that mental health, including depression and suicide mortality, are affected by aspects of people’s living environment. It comprises the built, natural, and social settings within which people live, move, and interact. The mechanisms underpinning these environment-mental health relations are poorly understood and not universally confirmed across research.
State-of-the-art research assumed that the neighbourhood people live in is the sole health influencing environmental context. The NEEDS project called this restricting assumption into question by arguing that our contemporary society is increasingly mobile, and people are exposed to multiple environmental exposures during their daily lives (e.g. at their workplace, during travel) and over the course of their lives. Such dynamic environments can, for example, trigger, reduce, or amplify the risk of suffering from a mental disorder. With the aim to disentangle the complex relationships between dynamic environmental exposures, depression, and suicide, the NEEDS project addressed this critical knowledge gap.
The NEEDS project was the first to advance our conceptual and theoretical understanding of how dynamic exposures affect people’s depression and suicide mortality. We achieved this aim by combining several methodological innovations such as tracking people’s mobility with global positioning system-enabled smartphones, population-wide register studies, and modelling from statistics and machine learning. NEEDS marked a shift in the scientific approach to assessing dynamic environmental exposures and resulted in important insights into how these exposures relate to mental health. Since depression and suicide are increasingly prevalent, knowledge about dynamic exposures is key to revealing depression and suicide aetiologies and informing the design of health-promoting interventions and the formulation of policy, resulting in healthier urban living.
