This simple addition to a city can dramatically improve people’s mental health

Sumary of This simple addition to a city can dramatically improve people’s mental health:

• Its findings back up studies that indicate time spent among foliage and in nature can help relieve a number of stress-related conditions..
• Planting trees in urban areas can help reduce stress and anxiety for the people living there, according to a new study..
• Their investigations were informed by many studies that showed time spent in nature could reduce anxiety in sufferers..
• One found that test subjects who had spent more time in leafy surroundings showed lower levels of a biochemical stress indicator called serum cortisol..
• The results did indeed suggest that proximity to trees corresponded with a lower rate of antidepressant prescription..
• More precisely, they showed that living within 100 metres of a tree – of any species – was associated with lower use of antidepressants..
• “Our finding suggests that street trees, a small-scale, publicly accessible form of urban greenspace, can help close the gap in health inequalities,”.
• She concluded that “street tree planting in residential areas of cities may be a nature-based solution to reduce the risk of depression”.
• and said it had “important implications for urban planning and nature-based health interventions in cities”..
• In one case reported in The Guardian, a resident of a poor area of Baltimore found that her mental health improved so much after a programme of street greening that she was able to stop taking the antidepressants she’d been prescribed for many years..
• One in four people will experience mental illness in their lives, costing the global economy an estimated $6 trillion by 2030..
• Mental ill-health is the leading cause of disability and poor life outcomes in young people aged 10–24 years, contributing up to 45% of the overall burden of disease in this age-group…

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From World Economic Forum - April 7, 2021