Schizophrenia and urban deprivation: When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?

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In my head, I had the association between increased urbanicity and risk of schizophrenia (Vassos et al, 2012) boxed off as a purely environmental risk factor. Being born in the capital city compared to being born in rural areas increases the risk of developing most mental disorders (Vassos et al, 2016).

Then along came this paper (Sariaslan et al, 2016), which followed-up an earlier study by the same group (Sariaslan et al, 2014) linking multiple data sources in Sweden (which keeps frightening amounts of data about their citizens in a variety of reliable Registries) to show that increased population density as well as deprivation increased the risk for a person being diagnosed with schizophrenia. This effect disappeared once effects of unobserved familial risk factors were accounted for. This suggested that urbanicity and deprivation effects on the risk of developing schizophrenia are due to more than the environmental effects of living in an urban and/or deprived environment.

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I very much believe in the social drift theory relating to severe mental illness. My upbringing was solidly middle class and growing up I lived in fairly affluent middle class areas.
However since living independently wherever I have lived it has been in the poorer parts of town.

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I was affected similarly through my parents’ divorce. When my dad remarried things got better again.