Urban Suicide: The Enemy We Choose Not to See
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Welcome to a new kind of war: the rise of endless urban conflict | Cities | The Guardian
Others engage in wars with no end in sight. What such irregular combatants tend to share is that they urbanise war. Cities are the space where they have a fighting chance, and where they can leave a mark likely to be picked up by the global media.
Irregular combatants are at their most effective in cities. They cannot easily shoot down planes, nor fight tanks in open fields. We have seen this across Iraq since , when the US and its allies led their second war in Iraq.
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Along with Vietnam, this conflict was one of the first major examples in our current epoch of these asymmetric wars, and a good case for examining how irregular combatants can derail a massive conventional army. Nor do contemporary urban wars even prioritise direct combat. Rather, they produce forced urbanisation and de-urbanisation. In many cases, such as Kosovo, displaced people swell urban populations.
Indeed, warring forces now often avoid battle.
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Their main tactic is the terror of conspicuous atrocities, such as in South Sudan, home to a brutal and bloody war with no end in sight fought between two strongmen and former collaborators , or the Congo, where irregular armies fighting for control of mining wealth have killed millions. The western military is learning. They have learned, above all, that the city itself has become an obstacle. Global media certainly have an easier time reporting on major cities than on villages and fields.
This engagement with the urban goes beyond attacks on people: To be specific, while Meyer-Lindenberg and his accomplices were stressing out their subjects, they were looking at two brain regions: The amygdalas are known to be involved in assessing threats and generating fear, while the pACC in turn helps to regulate the amygdalas. In stressed citydwellers, the amygdalas appeared more active on the scanner; in people who lived in small towns, less so; in people who lived in the countryside, least of all. And something even more intriguing was happening in the pACC.
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Here the important relationship was not with where the the subjects lived at the time, but where they grew up. Again, those with rural childhoods showed the least active pACCs, those with urban ones the most. In the urban group moreover, there seemed not to be the same smooth connection between the behaviour of the two brain regions that was observed in the others. An erratic link between the pACC and the amygdalas is often seen in those with schizophrenia too. And schizophrenic people are much more likely to live in cities.
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When the results were published in Nature, in , media all over the world hailed the study as proof that cities send us mad. Of course it proved no such thing — but it did suggest it. Even allowing for all the usual caveats about the limitations of fMRI imaging, the small size of the study group and the huge holes that still remained in our understanding, the results offered a tempting glimpse at the kind of urban warping of our minds that some people, at least, have linked to city life since the days of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The year before the Meyer-Lindenberg study was published, the existence of that link had been established still more firmly by a group of Dutch researchers led by Dr Jaap Peen.
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In their meta-analysis essentially a pooling together of many other pieces of research they found that living in a city roughly doubles the risk of schizophrenia — around the same level of danger that is added by smoking a lot of cannabis as a teenager. Interestingly, however, a person's risk of addiction disorders seemed not to be affected by where they live.
At one time it was considered that those at risk of mental illness were just more likely to move to cities, but other research has now more or less ruled that out.
So why is it that the larger the settlement you live in, the more likely you are to become mentally ill? Another German researcher and clinician, Dr Mazda Adli, is a keen advocate of one theory, which implicates that most paradoxical urban mixture: Meanwhile, a group of researchers at Hammersmith hospital, in London, are among many who believe that dopamine could hold the answer. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter with many functions, one of which is to infuse your brain when something important — good or bad — is happening. It might be that you are tasting an ice cream and your body wants you to eat the lot while you can, or it might be that a volcano is erupting and your body wants you to find your car keys nice and promptly.
In this field, a lot is at stake. Localised actions by local armed groups, mostly acting independently from other such groups, let alone from actors in the war zone — this fragmented isolation has become a new kind of multi-sited war. As Jenks dives deeper, questions pop up. Show 25 25 50 All. In the old wars, there was the option of calling for an armistice. A note lay nearby:
Dopamine levels are often very high in parts of schizophrenic peoples' brains. But if your dopamine cells are firing, your brain will try and make sense of it. It will seem to say there's something very important about that car, then your brain will try to process that and, depending on your experience and your culture, it might jump to the conclusion that it was MI5 following you around.
Cities, the theory goes, might be part of the reason why a person's dopamine production starts to go wrong in the first place. Repeated stress is thought to lead to this problem in some people, so if high social density combined with social isolation could be shown to do so, and thus to alter the dopamine system, we might have the first rough sketches of a map from city living all the way to schizophrenia, and perhaps other things.
Thus far, nobody has shown that.
And Bloomfield's team, led by Dr Oliver Howes, are being hampered in their attempts to do so by a shortage of volunteers who live in small towns or in the countyside. If you'd be willing to step forward, please email him at michael. They'll reimburse you for your time. When you consider that stress is involved in some of schizophrenia's other known risk factors, such as being an immigrant and experiencing psychological trauma, it does look like a good theory. In this field, a lot is at stake. Schizophrenia is already one of the leading causes of disability worldwide, and its prevalence looks likely to increase.