Air Pollution Linked to Increased Mental Health Outpatient Visits | Hacker News Reader

Air Pollution Linked to Increased Mental Health Outpatient Visits

medicine.yale.edu

134 pointshamilyon230 comments

I'm really curious how many diseases will mysteriously become a lot less common once we stop driving ICE vehicles and perhaps cycle and use public transit more.

And once we stop burning coal... and once we stop coating all our food packaging, clothes and furniture in PFAS... and once we ban all single-use plastics...

These kind of tweaks to our society would not require a lot of technical effort - we already have all the alternatives - we just the popular rage against their use and the political will to ban them.

BPA plastics are linked with a decrease in testosterone which lasts multiple generations.

BPA plastics are found nearly everywhere.

https://rbej.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12958-018-0...

But the GPs comment is still correct. I wonder what will change with the removal of ICE vehicles from public roads.

From the paper:

"It has been estimated that levels of conjugates of BPA in urine are above safety thresholds in 90% of individuals tested in several population studies"

Tire wear and brake pad dust are also a big 2.5PM problem. Regenerative braking helps a lot, but just moving to non-ICE won't completely solve the problem.

Personally I hope for a future where most people don't need cars, or don't need them as often.

Speculative links between schizophrenia and urbanization have been based on some sort of big city cold shoulder versus the warm pastoral P's and Q's you get in a small town. Could the simpler explanation just be "the air is dirty?"

It was time-series data.

One aspect I'd add to schizophrenia is urban housing isn't as peaceful as you would think, tested this with a contact microphone and darn, those faint convo's you hear at night - well they can actually be real. Add in a roof and a housing estate back to back with tinny weeny gardens if any and you have an environment that would sure exacerbate or indeed induce symptoms that to the patient present to a doctor would be an easy tick box and pill prescription.

Heck one of my neibours has a nickname same as my surname and his other half would nag by calling his name loud at night - that really wasn't helpful for my REM phase sleeps I tell you and one mystery I'm glad that I solved.

> induce symptoms that to the patient present to a doctor would be an easy tick box and pill prescription

Schizophrenia is far more severe than "faint voices in the night". One of the requirements is that the symptoms cause significant impairment to normal function.

Additionally, general physicians are not qualified to diagnose or treat schizophrenia.

Mental illnesses aren't causal labels to be thrown around.

I forgot the source, but there is apparently compelling evidence that one cause of schizophrenia may viral infections.

What about controlling for common cause hypothesis? That urbanization is linked to both more specialization to support more mental health outpatient capacity and better diagnosis? Let alone in the case of it being harder to hide and more obvious if someone starts having a psychotic episode in the middle of a city street vs on his own twelve acres.

The examples of China aren't that great for it. A drop in visits after pollution declined in a city would dodge many of the variables in question - if it was already urbanized and specialized then it would drop more. I may be unduly cynical about the Ivy Leagues but I suspect those examples were 'clickbait' chosen for provocativeness over soundness.

That isn't to say that there is never a link between pollution and negative mental health outcomes. It is abundantly clear that lead poisoning is linked to dumb aggression and crime for instance.

It took me almost 10 years to find out that I have Rhinosinusitis (confirmed by CT scan as well), most doctors wanted to send me to psychologist. Mucus goes to my airway when there’s air pollution, which makes it very hard to sleep, and of course it decreases my mental capacity and well being significantly as well.

More we move away from nature, more we are getting sick (mentally/physically/psychologically). It is not only air pollution other natural resources like polluted water , contaminated food/veggies [an alarming article i came across (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041201...)] all are having some or other kind of serious effects on body.

We get all these vehicle-miles-traveled from a desire to stay with nature. That's what the suburban development pattern is all about. Ironically if we just made a clean break with nature and lived in straight-up urban environments, we could have clean air.

But moving in nature is also the worst way to care about it. Living in a dense city us most environmental friendly.

And reducing the human population.

That's not the problem: a Nigerian emits 5% of the carbon footprint of a US person. So they could have 20x as many babies as the Americans? We also have wide differences in the same town and family, too: for instance, my father has emitted at least 20x the CO2 than I did in 2020 (because he like big cars, big houses and fly many times a year).

The problem is clearly what each human being can emit for themselves, according to their means.

To take an alternative stance:

People are living longer and better than at any point in history. Nature has its own dangers, we’ve just traded some issues for others.

That's a false dichotomy. We can certainly do better.

I really dislike that term, we can always do better up to some unknown “best”.

But if we’re comparing nature vs now then “what we can do” doesn’t factor because it’s far too unknown and handwavy.

That's not really true, more people live longer now that ever in human history. You are making the assumption that people are having more mental health problems now than in the past; but that is just an assumption.

Nodays, more than half of people in developed countries die from diseases cause by their lifestyle.

Would love to see non-EV's taxed when entering high density residential cores.

Aside: I moved to Vancouver partially because the air quality:population density ratio can't be beat.

In Germany, vehicles have emissions ratings, with a corresponding windshield sticker. https://www.germanemissionssticker.com/ Vehicles below a certain threshold are banned from "low emission zones" defined by local governments; most are densely built inner city areas.

I don't think they make much of a difference reducing traffic, since the requirements for a rating that will let you drive everywhere are really easy to fulfil. But I suppose they trim the worst of the worst.

EV's don't pollute the air, but they emit electromagnetic radiation which is an environmental pollution too.

There's a number of papers linking air pollution with neurological damage.

https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/air-pollution-li...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041201...

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abst...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139...

Reminder: particulate is not just one substance, it's a zoo. It's not surprising that some can get into our bloodstream and become neurotoxic.

Is this causation or correlation? Are the factors in urban environments which correlate with air pollution may also be responsible Don't get me wrong, air pollution is clearly very bad, but without clear evidence any other cholerating factor could be just as likely the cause, such environmental noise, population density, standard of living etc.

Maybe they should eat more chocolate?

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/chocolate-consumption-vs-nob...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com