Mental Health, Migration and the Chinese Mega-City

至少从20世纪初开始，我们就知道，住在城市和被诊断患有精神疾病之间存在联系。但是，围绕城市生活与城市生活之间关系的特殊性的问题一直持续到21世纪。例如，我们仍然不知道为什么精神疾病会聚集在城市；我们不知道它与城市贫困、剥夺、过度拥挤、社会排斥和种族主义的经历有什么关系；我们不知道确切的生物学和社会学机制，将困难的城市生活转化为可诊断的精神健康状况。我们“确实”知道的是，进入城市的移民在城市精神疾病负担中承担了不成比例的很大一部分；我们知道，密集的生活环境似乎加剧了这个问题；我们知道，城市生活的普遍压力，混乱和不稳定，有时会为临床问题的发展创造基础。如果说心理健康与城市之间的关系存在未解之谜，那么这些问题在当代中国尤为突出：中国在过去十年中以前所未有的速度城市化，现在已经成为一个以城市为主的社会。但是在19世纪的欧洲，城市化来自于人口的增长，而在21世纪的中国，情况有所不同：大部分的增长来自于农村移民进入城市。因此，在中国，城市转型与精神疾病之间的联系是一个关键问题：(1)中国的发展与农村向城市的迁移有关；(2)未被认识和治疗的精神障碍是使个人和家庭陷入贫困和社会排斥的一个关键因素；(3)城市心理健康政策的有效发展需要对城市压力、不稳定的生活条件和精神障碍等相关问题有更深入的了解。本项目旨在了解中国特大城市上海人口流动与心理健康之间的关系。鉴于我们对城市心理健康与特定社会生活模式（贫困、移民、密集住房等）之间关系的了解，我们的出发点是，这个问题需要社会科学的新投入。该项目的核心是试图将我们对当代上海心理健康的了解与一种新的近距离街头数据相结合，以了解上海外来人口的日常生活——特别是在压力、住房和获得服务方面。然后，我们将这两种形式的知识联系起来，形成一种新的调查方式，为上海流动人口心理健康测绘提供一种新的社会学深度调查工具。该项目由英国和中国的研究人员共同完成，主要问题是：(1)上海的精神障碍实际上是如何形成的，这种模式如何受到近期移民的影响？(2)移民在上海是如何被吸收的，上海移民社区的日常生活是怎样的？(3)哪些政策、服务或法律可以缓解上海外来人口的心理健康状况？(4)对于其他发展中特大城市（如圣保罗或拉各斯）的类似问题，上海有什么可以借鉴的地方？该项目还将为中英联合研究计划优先考虑的两个主要研究领域提供新的数据：“移民和公共服务”，我们将研究福利制度与移民之间的关系，并分析目前有助于缓解这一问题的服务，以及移民获得这些服务的途径；(2)“不平等与日常生活”，我们将对上海流动人口日常生活中的不平等进行近距离的街头分析，并试图理解城市不平等如何导致心理健康问题的发展。

We have known, since at least the early twentieth century, that there is an association between living in a city and being diagnosed with a mental illness. But questions around the specificity of relationship between urban life and have continued well into the twenty-first century. We still don't know, for example, exactly why mental illness clusters in cities; we don't know how it relates to experiences of urban poverty, deprivation, overcrowding, social exclusion, and racism; and we don't know the precise biological and sociological mechanisms that turn difficult urban lives into diagnosable mental health conditions. What we *do* know is that migrants into cities bear a disproportionately large share of the burden of urban mental illness; we know that dense living conditions seem to exacerbate the problem; and we know that the general stress, tumult and precarity of urban living can, sometimes, create the basis for the development of clinical problems.If there are unanswered questions around the relationship between mental health and the city, these questions are particularly acute in contemporary China: China has urbanised at an unprecedented rate in the last decade, and has now become a majority urban society. But whereas in nineteenth-century Europe urbanization came from a growth in population, in twenty-first century China the situation is different: most of the growth is from rural migrants coming into the cities. In China, then, the link between urban transformation and mental illness is a critical issue: (1) Development in China is related to migration from the countryside into the cities; (2) Unrecognized and untreated mental disorder is a key factor in casting individuals and families into poverty and social exclusion; (3) Effective development of urban mental health policu requires far greater understanding of the related problems of urban stress, precarious living conditions and mental disorderThis project is an attempt to understand the relationship between migration and mental health in one Chinese mega-city: Shanghai. Given what we know about the relationship between urban mental health and particular patterns of social life (poverty, migration, dense housing, and so on), it starts from the position that this question requires new input from the social sciences. At the heart of the project is an attempt to mix what we know about mental health in contemporary Shanghai with a new kind of close-up, street-level data on what the daily experience of being a migrant on Shanghai is actually life - especially with regard to stress, housing, and access to services. We will then connect these two forms of knowledge to produce a new kind of survey for getting a new sociological deep surveying instrument for mapping migrant mental health in Shanghai. The project, which is split between researchers in the UK and China, asks: (1) How is mental disorder actually patterned in Shanghai, and how is that pattern affected by recent migration? (2) How are immigrants absorbed in Shanghai, and what is daily life actually like in Shanghai's migrant communities? (3) What policies, services, or laws might alleviate mental health among migrants in Shanghai? (4) What can be learned in Shanghai for similar problems in other developing mega-cities (such as Sao Paolo or Lagos). This project should also us to also produce new data on two of the major research-areas that are prioritised under this join UK-China research-scheme: 'Migration and public services,' where we will look at the relationship between the welfare system and migration, and analyse the services that currently help to alleviate this problem, as well as migrants' access to those services; (2) 'Inequalities and everyday life,' where we will develop a close-up, street-level analysis of the lived inequalities of everyday migrant life in Shanghai, and try to understand how urban inequality might contribute to the development of mental health problems?