Special issue on mental health and environmental exposures

Open call for papers. We organizing a special issue on mental health and environmental exposures in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. The call will be open until December 31, 2017.

One out of five grown-ups suffered from a mental disorder within the past year, on a global scale. With a lifetime prevalence of two out of seven adults, mental disorders will remain a leading cause of disease burden (see Steel Z et al. The global prevalence of common mental disorders: a systematic review and meta-analysis 1980–2013. Int. J. Epidemiol. 2014, 43(2): 476–493). While mental disorders have devastating consequences for people’s quality of life, they also represent striking challenges for health systems as a whole. Thus, the reduction of mental disorders is a health priority in both developed but also developing countries.

Past research has well-documented that mental disorders emerge as a complex interplay between genetic, psychological, and lifestyle factors, among others. However, throughout a day and over the life course, humans are continuously exposed to social and physical environments including green space, noise, air pollution, etc. Such environmental factors have received scant attention thus far and our existing understanding is tentative, partly inconclusive, and calls for more research dealing with which, how, and to what extent environmental exposures, individually or in combination, affect mental health.

To address this research gap, we organizing a Special Issue on Mental Health and Environmental Exposures in the peer-reviewed scientific journal the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. In order to initiate and further stimulate discussions on this topic, we invite original research, methodological papers, reviews, as well as meta-analyses related to the entire spectrum of mental disorders (e.g., depression, schizophrenia). In addition, we will also feature papers documenting how scientific findings translate into prevention strategies, health policies, and clinical practices.

Complementing traditional health and epidemiological research, significant contributions can be expected from transdisciplinary approaches integrating health (register) data, increasingly available environmental data in tandem with geotechnologies (e.g., geographic information systems) and cutting-edge data analytics (e.g., machine learning, Bayesian spatial and space-time models). This Special Issue is of great interest to both scientific communities and policy-makers. We hope that the contributions will support evidence-based public health policies in the long term.