Mental Health, Migration and the Chinese Mega-City

至少从二十世纪初开始，我们就知道，居住在城市和被诊断出患有精神疾病之间存在联系。但是，关于城市生活和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，我们仍然不知道精神疾病在城市中聚集的确切原因；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；我们也不知道将艰难的城市生活转变为可诊断的精神健康状况的确切生物学和社会学机制。我们所知道的是，进城务工人员在城市精神疾病的负担中承担了不成比例的大比例；我们知道密集的生活条件似乎加剧了问题；我们知道城市生活的普遍压力、骚乱和早产儿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的关系存在悬而未决的问题，那么这些问题在当代中国身上尤为尖锐：在过去十年里，中国以前所未有的速度城市化，现在已经成为城市社会的主体。但是，在19世纪的欧洲，城市化源于人口的增长，而在21世纪，中国的情况则不同：大部分的增长来自于进入城市的农村移民。因此，中国认为，城市转型与精神疾病之间的联系是一个关键问题：(1)中国的发展与从农村到城市的移民有关；(2)未被认识和治疗的精神障碍是导致个人和家庭陷入贫困和社会排斥的关键因素；(3)有效发展城市心理健康政策需要更多地了解城市压力、不稳定的生活条件和精神障碍等相关问题。本项目旨在了解中国一个特大城市--上海--移民与心理健康的关系。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)之间的关系的了解，它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型的街头特写数据结合在一起，这些数据展示了上海外来务工人员的日常生活--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结合起来，产生一种新的调查方式，以获得一种新的社会学深度调查工具，用于绘制上海流动人口的心理健康状况图。该项目由英国和中国的研究人员共同完成，问题是：(1)上海的精神障碍实际上是如何形成的，最近的移民又是如何影响这种模式的？(2)上海是如何接纳外来人口的，上海外来人口社区的日常生活实际上是什么样的？(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？(4)对于其他发展中的特大城市(如圣保罗或拉各斯)的类似问题，上海可以学到什么。这个项目还应该让我们提供两个主要研究领域的新数据，这两个领域是加入英国-中国研究计划的优先领域：“移民与公共服务”，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，以及农民工获得这些服务的情况；(2)“不平等与日常生活”，我们将对上海日常农民工生活中的生活不平等进行近距离、街头层面的分析，并试图了解城市不平等可能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?