Urban Greenspace and Mental Health

1 UK MAB Urban Forum Urban greenspace and mental health (Prepared for the UK MAB Urban Forum by Ian Douglas, May 2004) “Denying the relevance of nature to our deepest emotional needs is still the rule in mainstream therapy, as in the culture generally. It... More

1 UK MAB Urban Forum Urban greenspace and mental health (Prepared for the UK MAB Urban Forum by Ian Douglas, May 2004) “Denying the relevance of nature to our deepest emotional needs is still the rule in mainstream therapy, as in the culture generally. It is apt to remain so until psychologists expand our paradigm of the self to include the natural habitat—as was always the case in indigenous cultures, whose methods of healing troubled souls included the trees and rivers, the sun and stars” (Theodore Roszak, 1996). For urban people, the separation from nature is greater than in other forms of human settlement, but need not necessarily be so. Natural vegetation fulfils many ecosystem and human well-being functions in urban areas. One of the more important is alleged to be improvement in mental health, through recovery from, or alleviation of, mental illness and stress and through helping to raise a feeling of well-being among people using natural areas. Since 2000, urban greenspace Less