Vegas Is Bad For You(r Mind)

Ignoring that the city practically runs on the fuel of people’s desires and vices, Vegas as a city is actually quite an impressive feat of human endeavor. Hundreds of thousands of people descending on a strip of structurally impressive (in their audacity anyway) buildings that promise to give you all the entertainment that you could want. There is a lot to be said for the ambition and money required to satisfy (and  of course disappoint) people from all walks of life from all parts of the world in equal measure. Recently standing in line for a drink at a coffee shop in one of the ginormous hotels I heard drink orders placed in accents from places as varied as the UK, China, New York and somewhere in South America. As I’m wont to do, my mind wandered on how this one place can bring us all to a heightened state of ‘want’ just based on the design of the spaces. And I also started to wonder about how the design of the city of Las Vegas might impact the mental health of its residents and visitors (like me).

In recent years, and particularly due to the pandemic, a lot of research and investigation has been focused on the relationships between our environments, our biology and our mental health. Most of this research has focused on the microenvironmental psychosocial factors, things like how your mood is affected by the orchid you’ve placed right beside your second screen and how loud your partner is on his zoom call. More recently, Jiayuan Xu et all decided to research how the macro urban living environments affect our mental health. In their paper ‘Effects of urban living environments on mental health in adults (Nature Medicine, June 15, 2023), the researchers analyzed data from over 150,000 adults in the UK Biobank cohort to examine how complex real-life exposure to city living relates to mental health. The researchers identified distinct profiles of the urban environment, characterized by different combinations of factors like air pollution, green space, and socioeconomic conditions. Three urban environmental profiles were correlated with specific psychiatric symptom groups: 1) A profile of high deprivation, air pollution, and lack of green space was associated with increased affective symptoms like depression. This relationship was mediated by reductions in brain regions involved in reward processing. 2) A profile characterized by more green space and land use diversity was linked to reduced anxiety symptoms. This was mediated by differences in brain regions involved in emotion regulation. 3) A third profile of greater land use density correlated with emotional instability symptoms. - The correlations between environmental profiles and psychiatric symptoms were small but significant (r values 0.10-0.22). Summary; green spaces good, non-green (or artificial) spaces bad for mental health. 

Beyond just taking your money - the house always wins or something like that - Vegas literally diminishes your mind with its artificial spaces. My cab driver (I get in a lot of cabs) took a shortcut which went through backs of the grand buildings on the strip. What I saw left me cold; workers lining up to get their food served from a plain plastic table, people sitting in corners next to heaps of trash to consume their food and a general sense of hopelessness. That view changed me. I’ve never liked Vegas but this permanently sealed it for me. We need to change how we build our spaces if we don’t want to keep damaging the mental health of people at scale.