The relationship between neighborhood-level socioeconomic characteristics and individual mental disorders in five cities in Latin America: multilevel models from the World Mental Health Surveys (original) (raw)

2018, Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology

Our understanding of community-level predictors of individual mental disorders in large urban areas of lower income countries is limited. In particular, the proportion of migrant, unemployed, and poorly educated residents in neighborhoods of these urban areas may characterize group contexts and shape residents' health. Cross-sectional household interviews of 7251 adults were completed across 83 neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, Argentina; Medellín, Colombia; São Paulo, Brazil; Lima, Peru; and Mexico City, Mexico as part of the World Mental Health Survey Initiative. Past-year internalizing and externalizing mental disorders were assessed, and multilevel models were used. Living in neighborhoods with either an above-average or below-average proportion of migrants and highly educated residents was associated with lower odds of any internalizing disorder (for proportion migrants: OR 0.75, 95% CI 0.62-0.91 for the bottom tertile and OR 0.79, 95% CI 0.67-0.94 for the top tertile compared...