How much of an effect does your environment have on your mental health? Plenty. Does it mean you're doomed if your environment is supposedly negative? Not necessarily. What can we attribute the high rate of social and psychological problems in cities to? And, are urban areas predestined to be a hub for high social and psychological problems. The latter two are questions David Quinton is attempting to answer in the annotation titled " Urbanism and Child Mental Health ". In this commentary, Quinton reviews other researchers' data and attempts to explain the phenomena. The research primarily includes subjects from London's boroughs, as well as, urban areas from Oslo, Beijing and Kampala. Quinton notes a similar review by Freeman (1984) is in circulation, but it failed to consider the process of city rise and decay, the qualities of urban life and the impacts of the physical environment.
             Quinton begins by commenting that there are few studies of early childhood disorders that compare children in urban and rural areas within the same culture using the same assessment measures. Instead, studies rely on ecological correlations in bureaucratically limited areas. This data produced an unsurprising casual connection between indicators such as housing features and deviance. However, the ecological fallacy - the inclination to draw conclusions from unrelated indicators - presents problems. Therefore, data related to area differences is deemed tainted because of certain influences. He reviewed Lavik's 1977 study of disorder rates in Oslo with a rural sample, and surprise, behavior problems were more common in the city. Basically, Quinton found the urban areas to have higher instances of negative actions in all the studies he reviewed. He reviewed studies based on the following sub-topics: Intra-urban differences, migration, features of the area, housing characteristics, urban environment, urban malaise and social isolati...