The results of our special issue on mental health and the environment in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health are now also published as a book. The open access book can be be found here.

Together with Amit Birenboim et al. we did a study on wearables and location tracking technologies for mental-state sensing in outdoor environments. The paper is accepted in The Professional Geographer. Abstract: Advances in commercial wearable devices are increasingly facilitating the collection and analysis of everyday physiological data. This paper discusses the theoretical and practical aspects of…

In a recently published paper we addressed this question using a sample of patients who had been admitted to the psychiatric ward of an academic hospital in Utrecht, The Netherlands. The full paper is freely available.

Exposure to green space seems to be beneficial for self-reported mental health. In this study we used an objective health indicator, namely antidepressant prescription rates. Current studies rely exclusively upon mean regression models assuming linear associations. It is, however, plausible that the presence of green space is non-linearly related with different quantiles of the outcome…

Our findings dealing with the influence of residential green space on suicide risk received media attention. The study findings results were mentioned on the Dutch news (NOS), the newspaper De Telegraaf etc. See the article ‘Gemiddeld minder zelfdodingen in omgeving met veel groen‘ on NOS for more information.    

Natural outdoor environments, such as green spaces (ie, grass, forests, or parks), blue spaces (ie, visible bodies of fresh or salt water), and coastal proximity, have been increasingly shown to promote mental health. However, little is known about how and the extent to which these natural environments are associated with suicide mortality. Our aim was to…

The deadline to submit manuscripts to our special issue on Mental Health and Environmental Exposures in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. The call will be open until August 30, 2018.

This special issue is a collaboration between Mei-Po Kwan, Derek Karssenberg, Simon Scheider and the NEEDS team. Since the introduction of geographic information systems (GIS) a few decades ago, this technology has radically altered numerous scientific domains with public and environmental health standing out. The emerging opportunities to integrate and process spatial information into health…

A paper on space-time suicide risk using Bayesian modeling has been published in Scientific Reports. Despite comprehensive prevention programs in Germany, suicide has been on the rise again since 2007. The underlying reasons and spatiotemporal risk patterns are poorly understood. We assessed the spatiotemporal risk of suicide per district attributable to multiple risk and protective…

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…