Did we really need a study for this? Of course, it has to be scientifically proven and not just emotional garble. The study executed in the United States and Denmark shows air pollution contributes to psychiatric disorders. In other words, keep the air fresh, bodies of water near and ... you might be okay.

Abstract:

The search for the genetic factors underlying complex neuropsychiatric disorders has proceeded apace in the past decade. Despite some advances in identifying genetic variants associated with psychiatric disorders, most variants have small individual contributions to risk. By contrast, disease risk increase appears to be less subtle for disease-predisposing environmental insults. In this study, we sought to identify associations between environmental pollution and risk of neuropsychiatric disorders. We present exploratory analyses of 2 independent, very large datasets: 151 million unique individuals, represented in a United States insurance claims dataset, and 1.4 million unique individuals documented in Danish national treatment registers. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) county-level environmental quality indices (EQIs) in the US and individual-level exposure to air pollution in Denmark were used to assess the association between pollution exposure and the risk of neuropsychiatric disorders. These results show that air pollution is significantly associated with increased risk of psychiatric disorders. We hypothesize that pollutants affect the human brain via neuroinflammatory pathways that have also been shown to cause depression-like phenotypes in animal studies.

Some people become used to the city smell and don't realize how harmful it truly is. For me, city smell is one of the first things I notice when visiting.

Download here: air pollution journal.pbio.3000353

Direct link here.